How Kit (Formerly ConvertKit) Hit $25M Revenue on SEO and Community Flywheels
ConvertKit — now Kit — reached $25M revenue with no funding by engineering flywheels: creator stories that generated photography that generated backlinks that generated search traffic. Nathan Barry explained every gear on tape, including the profit-sharing spreadsheet.
On this page
By December 2020, ConvertKit — the email platform for creators, renamed Kit in 2024 — was at a $25M run rate, up from $19M the year before, fully bootstrapped, with 58 employees and its founder Nathan Barry cheerfully explaining exactly how the machine worked to his interviewer namesake. The tape is the best flywheel-engineering seminar in our archive.
Barry doesn’t describe growth channels — he describes how he builds systems where “every rotation makes the next rotation easier.”
The photography flywheel
The centerpiece ran in three moves:
- Profile creators, shoot them properly. Long-form stories, with local photographers paid $500–1,000 a shoot, roughly weekly.
- Give the photos away. Creators got them for their own websites, and the collection was released on Unsplash.
- Ask politely for the link. Millions of downloads later, popular sites everywhere were using the images — ConvertKit sent each one a note: credit us with a link if you like; no obligation.
The result was a backlink engine welded to a brand-building engine welded to a content library — by the interview, Ahrefs showed roughly 70,000 organic keywords, 120,000 monthly organic clicks, and 10 million+ backlinks. Total program cost: maybe $50–100K a year.
40%of all new accounts driven by search, per the December 2020 tape
“All the most iconic brands are storytellers,” Barry said — but the operational insight is that the storytelling was load-bearing: writing fed photography fed links fed search fed signups fed more stories.
Two more gears turned alongside it.
Powered the early years at 30%+ of revenue and still drove about 20%: roughly 3,000 paid affiliates at 30% commission, about $250K a month in payouts against $830K of affiliate-driven monthly revenue, with real concentration at the top. (As printed the numbers clash: $830K a month is about 40% of a $25M run rate, not 20% — the tape leaves the gap unreconciled.)
Adopted after Mailchimp’s Ben Chestnut spent 30 hotel-lobby minutes convincing Barry that free users become the employees who bring you into their next company. Modeled at 3% free-to-paid conversion; delivered 5%.
Profit sharing, down to the spreadsheet
Barry’s answer to venture-scale retention packages is the most copied part of the tape. Since the first team retreat in 2016 (when a 12-person company at 50% margins paid out $100K), ConvertKit has split a profit pool every six months.
Profit pool = 75% divided equally + 25% weighted by tenureIndividual-performance scores deliberately removed — “set a high bar to work here, then everyone wins and loses together.”
Spring 2020’s round averaged $11,000 per person; the pandemic-year H2 pool ran about $400K, smaller because the company had tried to spend itself unprofitable on brand advertising ($400K a month by then) and failed — “our accounting team was like, guys, we’re still profitable.”
His compensation quadrant is a complete comp philosophy in one napkin sketch:
- Salary — short-term guaranteed.
- 401(k) — long-term guaranteed.
- Profit sharing — short-term performance.
- Equity — long-term performance, a 10% team pool.
It rhymes with Wistia’s 10%-of-EBITDA scheme; the two tapes together are the bootstrapper’s answer to golden handcuffs.
What compounding quietly did next
The GetLatka dataset tracks the line after the tape: $29M (2021), $36.4M (2022), and about $43.8M by late 2024 — the year the company rebranded to Kit and kept marching toward the creator-commerce platform Barry sketched on air (a marketplace “a couple years off,” external-discovery viral loops first).
His own trajectory since — buying minority stakes in companies like SparkLoop, studying Warren Buffett and Tiny’s Andrew Wilkinson — was previewed in the interview’s best strategic aside: valuing ConvertKit conservatively at 7–8x ARR, he calculated that a million dollars of effort compounds far faster inside the machine he already owns than anywhere else. “This has worked. So let’s keep doing it.”
Current data lives on Kit’s GetLatka profile; the full December 2020 conversation is here. For the adjacent creator-economy money story, see Lenny’s Newsletter’s disclosed numbers — a one-person version of the same audience-first physics.
SourcesNathan Latka’s December 2020 interview with Nathan Barry; Ahrefs figures as cited on the tape; GetLatka dataset rows through late 2024.
