Nathan Barry

Founder & CEO Kit

Last Reviewed: September 19, 2026

Executive Summary

Nathan Barry is the founder and chief executive of Kit, the email and audience platform for professional creators that he launched as ConvertKit in 2013 and renamed in 2024. Kit’s distinguishing feature is not the software so much as the position it takes: Barry built it for people whose business is their audience, and he has consistently argued that email is the only distribution channel a creator actually owns. He is an unusual software founder in that he arrived from the customer side, having earned a living first as a freelance designer and then as a self-published author whose books on app and web design sold several hundred thousand dollars’ worth of copies. The company has been bootstrapped throughout, taking no venture capital, and now reports more than $45M in annual recurring revenue, more than $5M in annual profit, and a fully distributed team of about 95 people spread across more than 70 cities, run from Boise, Idaho.

Career Highlights

• Founded ConvertKit in 2013 as a side project doing roughly $1,000 a month in revenue and grew it past $45M in annual recurring revenue without outside investment.
• Rebranded the company from ConvertKit to Kit in 2024, widening its self-description from an email marketing tool to an operating system for creators.
• Acquired SparkLoop in 2023, a newsletter growth and paid-recommendation platform, and built it into Kit’s Creator Network, which pays creators for referring subscribers to one another.
• Runs a company of roughly 95 people across more than 70 cities with no head office, serving creators including Tim Ferriss and James Clear.
• Published three books before the company existed: The App Design Handbook, which he has described as the product that put him on the map; Designing Web Applications; and Authority, released in April 2013.
• Angel investor in creator- and marketing-adjacent companies including RightMessage and ManyChat.

Professional Journey

Barry started out doing freelance web design and moved into building iPhone apps, which is where the sequence that produced Kit really begins. Working as a designer taught him the craft; what changed his trajectory was writing about it. In 2012 he self-published The App Design Handbook, a technical book for designers moving into mobile, sold directly rather than through a publisher. It earned tens of thousands of dollars on launch and, more importantly, demonstrated a repeatable method: build an audience in public, write something that audience needs, sell it directly. He ran the same play twice more, with Designing Web Applications and then Authority, published in April 2013, the latter being a book about the method itself.

Those years made him a customer of the tooling he would go on to build. Selling digital products directly meant running launch sequences, segmenting readers, and tagging people by what they had bought, and the email software available at the time was built for retailers and marketing departments rather than for individuals with a mailing list. ConvertKit started in 2013 as a side project addressing exactly that gap, generating around $1,000 a month at the outset. Growth was not immediate, and Barry has been unusually public about the early plateau; the company’s eventual traction came from focusing narrowly on professional bloggers and authors rather than competing on general-purpose email marketing.

He kept it bootstrapped. Kit has never raised venture capital, which shaped both the pace and the strategy: profit had to fund growth, and the company optimised for retention among a defined customer group rather than for land-grab expansion. It also let Barry keep the company distributed and headquartered nowhere in particular, run from Boise, Idaho, with a team now around 95 people in more than 70 cities.

The strategy broadened in the 2020s from selling a tool to building a network. The 2023 acquisition of SparkLoop, a newsletter growth platform, gave Kit paid recommendations, which it combined with free recommendations in what became the Creator Network, so that creators on the platform grow each other’s lists and get paid for it. That is a materially different business from email delivery, and it set up the 2024 rebrand from ConvertKit to Kit, dropping a name tied to conversion mechanics in favour of one that could cover commerce, landing pages, recommendations and payouts. Barry frames the whole thing in the same terms he has used since the book years: his stated mission is to help creators earn a living, and he credits Basecamp’s Jason Fried for the idea that making money is a learnable skill rather than a fixed trait.

Education

Boise State University

Attended, marketing and graphic design

No completed degree or graduation year is stated in any source consulted.