Kick Founders Expand Into Creator Economy With New Social App Club

Club, the social platform co-founded by Bijan Tehrani and Ed Craven (yep, the same names attached to Kick and Stake.com), officially rolled out its iOS and Android app this week after clocking roughly 100,000 beta members in under two months — all without sustained marketing. CEO Henrik Pohlmann is billing it as a "more human form of social media," which is a lot of words for what is basically a Patreon-OnlyFans hybrid built by people who already know how to monetize the parasocial grind.

The play: subscriptions, tips, and a 20% cut

Club bundles the usual creator monetization stack — subscriptions, tipping, content unlocks, paid DMs, discovery tools — into one platform. The 20% cut on creator payments is the headline number, matching OnlyFans and sitting double what Substack and Patreon take. Pohlmann confirmed the platform will stay ad-free and explicitly said no adult content, which is an interesting line to draw for a company that also runs Stake.com.

The bigger flex is the infrastructure brag: Club reportedly shelled out $10 million just to own the Club.com domain. That's a move that tells you they're playing the long game on branding, not just beta metrics.

The Kick shadow: creators already on the move

Here's where it gets spicy for anyone watching the streaming meta. Roughly 3,000 creators have already signed during the beta, and a noticeable share are Kick livestreamers — which makes sense given Club is literally built by their bosses. Pohlmann tried to frame this as a marketing limitation rather than a narrower ambition, insisting Club operates independently of Kick with its own content moderation policy.

We know how that story tends to go. Kick launched in 2022, built its rep on lighter moderation than rivals, became a magnet for controversial personalities, and has only recently bulked up its human moderation team and opened up to advertising. So when the people who built that environment pitch "human" social media, the W/L community is right to ask what "human" actually means in their dictionary — and whether creator safety looks different when the same founders control the room.

The defining-feature question

Club's flagship launch beyond the app is Communities — customizable spaces where creators and fans can build fan profiles, run participation rewards, and tighten the engagement loop. One community has reportedly already passed 30,000 members, and Club says it's retaining 90% of creators after signup. The retention number is the real flex if it holds at scale.

But Ben Woods, Head of Creator Economy at Enders Analysis, told Business Insider the quiet part loud — creators already work across multiple platforms, so fans don't have a strong reason to follow them somewhere new unless there's a defining feature. The question hanging over Club isn't whether Kick's streamers will port over; that's basically guaranteed by the org chart. It's whether Club can hold up when the novelty fades and the parasocial money has to compete with every other subscription already sitting in a fan's stack.

So — is "more human" enough of a defining feature to survive the next twelve months, or is Club just a creator-economy waiting room until the next shiny platform drops?