Stop Treating Your Content Like Your Product — It's Your Funnel

The first decision Adam Biddlecombe made after acquiring AutoGPT was to shut down their paid subscription tier.

AutoGPT had a premium newsletter. Readers could pay for extra content. It seemed like obvious monetization. But Adam killed it immediately—and the decision reveals everything about how he thinks about content.

“If you have to say we have 200,000 readers now, and we say, okay, payers $5.99 a month and you get some more content. Right. So then that paid for piece of content has to be substantially better than the free piece of content. Right. Which is okay. But if you flip it, our free content is substantially worse than our paid for content. Then you’re no longer making the best product.”

The trap is elegant. The moment you paywalled content, you’ve created a contradiction. You’re doing a daily newsletter—that’s already intense. Now you’re saying the paying readers get an even better daily newsletter, which means the free content has to be worse. But if the free content is worse, fewer people find you. Your funnel shrinks. Your growth stops.

“So you limit the public content and you limit the quality of the top of funnel,” Adam explains.

The Product vs. Funnel Distinction

This is where most creators go wrong. They treat content as the product. “My content is how I make money. Therefore, better content = more money.”

But Adam thinks about it differently: “Is the content the product or is the content a way to get whatever the future product is to the masses?”

The latter is the winning frame.

If content is your funnel, you optimize for reach, trust, and audience quality—not for direct revenue. You give away the best thinking for free because the free content is what builds the brand. The monetization comes from something else: sponsorships, consulting, a SaaS product built on audience trust, equity partnerships with companies, courses, community—the list is long.

Alex Hormozi is Adam’s example. Hormozi probably has millions of dollars in business opportunities because he writes world-class content and gives it away free. But he doesn’t charge for the content itself. The content is the magnet. The revenue comes from what the magnet attracts.

Adam says Hormozi doesn’t promote products directly in his content. “However, I have his book on my bookshelf, right? And, you know, he’s talked about how his content is a play for acquisition.com. So he’s trying to create a magnet for people to, come to him and say, ‘Hey, I’ve got a company you want to buy.’”

The content builds the audience. The audience provides the business opportunities. The business opportunities are the monetization.

Why Paywalling Feels Right But Doesn’t Work

The intuition is understandable. You’re creating valuable content. People should pay for it. Isn’t charging the most direct path to revenue?

Not if you’re competing for attention with free alternatives.

Adam references The Hustle and Trends. The Hustle could have paywalled everything. Instead, they kept the main newsletter free and created Trends—a premium product that was separate from the core content. It’s not a paid version of the same thing; it’s an entirely different product that happens to use the same audience as a distribution channel.

“It’s a little bit different than, than, than, what a lot of newsletters do where they have like a premium newsletter,” Adam explains.

But even that strategy requires discipline. Sam Parr, who founded The Hustle, later admitted he’d regretted the pricing of Trends. “He says his, like, one of his big regrets is not charging 10 times the amount of money for that product. So I know $3,000 a month, three years. So, you have your, you have your content. If you monetize that, makes your free content worse.”

The key insight: if you paywalled content and it worked, it means you weren’t optimizing for growth in the first place. You were optimizing for near-term revenue at the cost of compounding growth.

The Frame That Changes Everything

The question Adam suggests every creator ask: “Is the content the product, or is the content a way to funnel people to my actual product?”

If content is the funnel, you:

• Give away your best thinking for free
• Build an audience as large as possible
• Use sponsorships to fund the operation (not to monetize the content, but to sustain the funnel)
• Identify what your audience actually wants (through conversations, direct requests, problems they face)
• Build the product around that specific audience (because they already trust you)
• Launch the product to the existing audience

If content is the product, you:

• Charge for content
• Limit distribution to people willing to pay
• Optimize for high-margin content, not quality content
• Assume everyone who’d benefit from your work is willing to pay
• Accept smaller audience size in exchange for higher revenue per person

The second path is viable if you’re solving a niche problem for a willing-to-pay audience. But if you’re building a media company or a creator platform, the first path wins.

The Long Game

Mindstream raised $0 in venture funding. They grew to 210,000 subscribers and sold to HubSpot for an undisclosed amount through pure audience leverage. They did this by treating the newsletter as the funnel, not the product.

The sponsorship revenue was real and paid the bills. But the real assets were: 210,000 people who trusted the editorial voice, a team that understood audience building, and a media brand that HubSpot believed could become the distribution layer for broader products.

None of that would have happened if Mindstream had paywalled the content and made the free version worse.

Adam puts it bluntly: “If you make your free content 10 out of 10 and your paid content is 10 out of 10, then there’s no reason to upgrade as well. It kind of cancels it out when you work through it in that way.”

The logic is simple. But the execution requires you to believe in something you can’t see yet—that the audience and trust you’re building now will unlock monetization opportunities you haven’t imagined.

FAQ

What should creators monetize instead of content?

Anything that becomes obvious once you have audience trust. Mindstream chose sponsorships. Alex Hormozi chose acquisition deals. Pat Flynn chose courses. The specific product doesn’t matter—only that it’s a natural extension of the audience and solves a real problem they have. The audience will tell you what they want if you listen.

How do you know when it’s the right time to launch a paid product?

When you have audience demand (people asking), when the product solves a different problem than the free content (not a premium version of the same thing), and when you’ve built enough trust that people would pay to go deeper. Trends worked for The Hustle because it was original research (separate product) for people who already read the daily newsletter.

Can you paywalled content eventually and keep the free content strong?

Theoretically, yes, but it’s risky. The moment you create a two-tier system, you’re allocating your best effort somewhere. Usually, that’s toward whichever tier makes more money. If the free tier is your funnel, it needs to stay best-in-class. If you paywalled later, you’re fighting against incentives that pull you toward the paid tier.

What about YouTube memberships or Substack paid tiers?

Same principle. If membership is 5% of your audience and monetizes at premium levels, fine. But you’ve created a reason to make the free content less perfect. If your goal is maximizing audience growth and building a brand moat, keep the free content 10/10. Monetize through sponsorships, partnerships, or separate products until the audience is mature.

How did Mindstream make money if they didn’t charge for content?

Sponsorships. They identified marketing managers searching for where to sponsor AI newsletters, ranked themselves at the top, and made it easy to reach them. This generated 30-40% of sponsorship inbound. The newsletter grew, the audience trusted them, and brands wanted access. No paywall required.

Is sponsorship a better monetization model than charging for content?

It depends on your audience and goals. Sponsorship scales better if your goal is audience growth, because the content stays free. Charging scales better if your goal is profitability per subscriber and you have a niche audience willing to pay. Most creators start with sponsorships and layer on other monetization once they’re large enough to attract meaningful productization opportunities.

What if your audience is too small to attract sponsors?

Build until they’re not. Sponsors want reach. If you have 5,000 subscribers, your sponsor rates are lower, but you’re still more valuable to sponsors than if you paywalled and had 1,000 subscribers. Keep the audience growing. The sponsorship opportunities follow.

How do you talk to your audience about monetization if you’re not charging for content?

Be honest about how you fund the thing. Adam’s Mindstream newsletter included sponsorships transparently. The audience understood: sponsors fund the newsletter so it stays free. Most audiences respect this if they believe you’ve chosen sponsors carefully. Integrity matters more than hiding where revenue comes from.

Can this model work for really niche creators or does it only work at scale?

It works at any scale. A niche creator with 500 highly engaged subscribers can attract sponsorships from companies that serve that niche. The model scales down well because your audience is valuable even if they’re small. The challenge is that at very small scale, monetization per subscriber is low. But that’s a problem with paywall too—500 paying subscribers at $5/month is still only $2,500 revenue.

What’s the biggest risk of treating content as a funnel?

The timeline. You’re not monetizing directly, so cash flow is tight. You need either some savings, sponsorship revenue, or willingness to work a second job while you grow the audience. Mindstream had angel investors who provided runway. Most creators don’t. But once you hit critical mass (50K+ subscribers with good engagement), sponsorship or partnerships become viable.

When should you actually paywalled content or create a membership?

When you have enough audience that some segment wants to pay for deeper access, when you’ve created a separate product (not just a premium version of the same content), and when you’re confident the paywall won’t become a psychological tax that makes the free content worse. Stripe, Substack, and ConvertKit all paywalled later—after building massive free audiences first.