Episode 1
Vitalii Dodonov
Co-founder and CTO, Stan
They Removed the Revenue Cut. Then Grew 8.5x in One Year.
The co-founder of Stan on deleting the transaction fee at $1M in revenue, and what happened to the business in the twelve months after.
Publishing August 4, 2026
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Where to watch and listen
- Annual revenue
- $30M
- Transaction fees
- 0%
- Active creators
- 85,000
- Creator earnings facilitated
- $600M+
- People on the team
- 30
- Total seed funding raised
- $5M
Most creator platforms take a cut. Stan stopped. In late 2022, at roughly $1 million in annual revenue, Vitalii Dodonov and his co-founder John Hu removed transaction fees entirely and put the whole company on a flat monthly subscription. Revenue grew 8.5x over the following year.
Vitalii Dodonov is the co-founder and CTO of Stan, a creator commerce platform doing about $30 million in annual revenue with a team of 30 and zero transaction fees. 85,000 active Creator-Entrepreneurs run their businesses on it. It has facilitated more than $600 million in creator earnings. The entire model is a $30-a-month subscription, built on one $5 million seed round from Forerunner Ventures, with additional backing from operators including Gary Vaynerchuk and Steven Bartlett.
The decision at the center of this conversation is the one almost nobody in the category made. Competing platforms charge somewhere between 10 and 20 percent of what a creator sells. That take rate is real revenue, and giving it up at $1 million ARR is giving up the fastest-compounding line in the business. Dodonov and Hu argued the opposite case: a platform that profits from a creator's success is a platform whose interests diverge from the creator's the moment that creator gets big. Mike walks him back through the room where that call was made — who pushed back, what the argument against it was, and what finally settled it.
The path into it is not the standard one. Dodonov studied chemical engineering and computer process control at the University of Alberta, worked at Deloitte and then eBay, and taught himself to build before co-founding Stan in 2021. He talks about the constraint that shaped the company more than any strategy did: a small team means the operative question is never what to build, it is what to refuse to build.
The through-line is a thesis that sounds strange coming from a monetization company. Dodonov's view is that monetization was never the hard part for creators. Audience is. Distribution is the bottleneck, churn in the creator economy is structural rather than a product failure, and building for that reality is what determines where the category goes next — including Stanley, the AI content agent Stan built in 14 days and launched in March 2026.
What the conversation covers
The transaction fee decision
Late 2022, around $1M ARR. Removing the cut entirely: who was in the room, the argument against it, and what pushed them over.
The 8.5x year
What happened immediately before the inflection, and what nearly broke on the way through it.
What a small team refuses to build
Talent density, deletion discipline, and why the team is small on purpose rather than by necessity.
Churn as a category truth
Why creator churn is structural rather than a product failure, and what that does to unit economics.
Audience, not monetization
The counterintuitive bottleneck thesis, and what it means for where Stan goes next.
Stanley, built in 14 days
An AI content agent shipped in two weeks, and what it changes for a solo creator competing with a marketing team.
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