Who we are, and why we built Kliio this way.

You made it to our about page, which probably means you’re curious who’s behind this thing. Good. Here’s the real answer.

Written by Jeff Olson · Co-founder & CEO

It started with a conversation. I’ve spent a long time in the creator space, and I was talking with a creator friend about walking away from the platform they were on. They wanted to. They didn’t, because the cost of leaving was too high: rebuild the audience, absorb the churn, start over on trust they’d already earned once. The idea died before it got anywhere near a decision.

That sat wrong with me. They’d built something real, and the platform they built it on was the only thing standing between them and actually owning it.

So I brought it to Melinda and Kat, and we started building the thing we thought should already exist: a layer that sits outside any platform and makes the audience relationship belong to the creator who built it. Not hosted somewhere. Not rented. Owned, and portable — no matter what platform they’re on or where they go next.

The trade nobody names when you sign up.

Here’s the part that convinced us this mattered beyond one conversation. The whole promise of being a creator is autonomy: build your own thing, own your own distribution, do the work on your own terms. That’s the dream. But the moment you publish anywhere, the thing you actually built — your audience — is held by a platform that controls it.

You got distribution.

The price was ownership.

That’s the trade, and it’s rarely stated that plainly. It isn’t only a creator problem, either. Anyone building something real on top of someone else’s infrastructure runs into it eventually.

We think this gets solved no matter what we do. Platforms keep consolidating, fees keep climbing, and creators keep asking for more control over what they’ve built. That trend doesn’t reverse. Someone builds this. We intend for it to be us, and we intend to push it forward faster than the industry would get there on its own.

We spent the time on the parts that don’t show up in a demo.

Software gets built fast now. That’s the baseline, not a differentiator. So we spent months on the harder question: what ‘creator-owned’ has to actually mean, structurally, for it to hold up under real use. Three commitments came out of that, and they’re architectural, not policy we can quietly revise later.

Consent-based

A member relationship enters Kliio because they agreed to it. There is no other path in.

100% yours

We hold the record. We don’t act on it, market to it, or monetize it on the side.

Exportable in full

Your data leaves in a format you can use, on your schedule, without asking us.

None of that was fast to figure out, and none of it was optional.

We’re bootstrapping this as long as we can.

Not as a badge of honor, a deliberate decision. Outside capital comes with outside incentives, and the fastest way to lose sight of who this is for is to answer to someone whose priorities aren’t creators’. We’re not against raising money. We’re against letting it steer this before the foundation is right.

We know what we’re doing here. Long careers in this industry, watching this exact problem from the inside, gave us a perspective on it that most people building in this space don’t have. We could be wrong about the timeline, or the exact shape this takes. We’re not wrong about the problem, and we’re not guessing at the solution.

Jeff

Our team

Long careers on the business side of this industry.

Jeff Olson

Co-founder & CEO

Years on the business side of the creator economy. Runs the thesis, sales, and partnerships.

Katerina Ostrovsky

Co-founder & COO

Designed the revenue model, the pricing, and the operating systems Kliio runs on.

Melinda Babin

Co-founder & CMO

Built the first working demo of Kliio. Owns the brand, narrative, and go-to-market.

Damien Bastin

Engineering

Takes the record from prototype to production: the syncs, the matching, the plumbing that can’t fail.

The rest of the site tells you what Kliio does. This page tells you why we’re building it.

If the trade in the middle of this page sounds familiar, we’d like to hear how it’s showing up in your business.

Talk to us

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