Why was The Culo Village created?

By Shakas Designer

Kylie Jenner has 400 million followers and she's still looking at Substack

I built The Culo Village because having an audience and owning your work turned out to be two completely different problems, and most founders only ever solve one of them. The Village exists…

I built The Culo Village because having an audience and owning your work turned out to be two completely different problems, and most founders only ever solve one of them. The Village exists specifically for the content that's already been made and already published somewhere, but has become impossible to find again. It's not a new place to write. It's a permanent home for the work you've already done.

Why does audience size not solve the ownership problem?

Kylie Jenner reportedly said she's open to starting a newsletter on Substack. On the surface that's a throwaway celebrity headline, but it's actually a useful data point. This is someone with one of the largest audiences on the internet, built over more than a decade, across nearly every platform that has mattered in that time. If reach was the thing that solved the problem, she would have solved it already.

She hasn't, because she doesn't own her Instagram audience. Meta does. She's built an enormous amount of attention on land she doesn't hold the title to, and every post she makes still has to clear an algorithm that owes her nothing, no matter how many followers are sitting on the other side of it. A newsletter fixes that going forward. It's portable. It doesn't rank you, demote you or reshuffle based on a platform's engagement targets for the quarter. But that's only half the problem, and it's the easier half.

What happens to everything you've already posted?

Here's the part that matters more for the rest of us, the founders and small business owners who aren't global celebrities. A newsletter only protects what you write into it from here forward. It does nothing for the years of posts, reels and appearances already sitting on platforms that don't preserve them. The feed moved on. The work didn't disappear exactly, but it may as well have, because nobody can find it anymore. That's a separate problem from starting a new owned channel, and it's the one I built The Culo Village to solve. Not a new place for new writing, but a permanent, searchable home for the work you've already made, across every platform you've ever posted to, so it doesn't vanish the moment a feed moves past it.

How does this actually play out? Stagger Inn Adventures is a real example.

Hi, I'm Shakas, and this is exactly the thing I lived through before I ever started building software. Mitch and I ran a 4WD tour company called Stagger Inn Adventures for years. We built the website, filmed the trips, put together the content, and ran a real business around travel and customer experience. Stagger Inn doesn't operate anymore. But the footage still exists. The lessons about what customers were actually buying, what it takes to deliver a promise you made in a post, what goes wrong on a remote trip and how you fix it on the spot, all of that is still true and still useful. It's just buried. It sits on an old YouTube channel and in old social posts that nobody is served anymore, because the algorithm has nothing to gain from showing a five-year-old clip from a business that no longer exists.

That's the exact gap I'm trying to close with the Village. It's not asking 'where do I write next.' It's asking 'what happens to everything I already made, and why can none of it be found.' Those are different questions, and most tools only answer the first one.

What's the practical way to check if you have this problem?

1. Open your own Instagram, YouTube or old blog and try to find a specific post from eighteen months ago without scrolling through everything in between. If you can't locate it by searching, neither can anyone else. 2. Ask whether that old content still contains something genuinely useful, a lesson, a story, an answer to a question someone is still asking. If it does, it's not expired just because the algorithm stopped showing it. 3. Check whether that content currently has its own permanent, individually findable web page, or whether it only exists inside a feed that will eventually bury it under newer posts. 4. If a platform changed its policy tomorrow or shut down entirely, work out what you'd actually lose. If the honest answer is 'most of it,' that's the signal the archive problem applies to you, not just to celebrities starting newsletters.

Does starting a newsletter or owned channel still matter?

Yes, and I don't want to undersell that half of it. Owning a channel you control, whether that's a newsletter, your own website or something else, is a real hedge against the next policy change. The instinct people have about this is usually backwards. Most assume owning a channel is only worth the effort once you already have a big audience. It's the reverse. The bigger your audience gets on a platform you don't own, the more that platform can take away in a single change. Starting an owned channel early isn't a luxury move for people who've already made it. It's protection against the exact thing fame doesn't protect you from.

But a newsletter protects what you write from today onward. It does nothing for the decade of posts, reels and appearances sitting behind you right now. That's a genuinely separate problem, and conflating the two is why so many founders start a Substack, feel like they've 'solved' discoverability, and then still can't find their own best work from two years ago.

Where does this leave the whole content picture?

The Village isn't trying to replace a newsletter, a website or LinkedIn. It's built to import what you've already posted across all of those places, whatever platform it originally lived on, and give each piece its own permanent, searchable web page connected back to you as the founder. New writing and old archive are two different inputs into the same idea: that a founder's credibility should be a connected body of work, not a pile of disconnected posts that only exist as long as a feed keeps distributing them.

If someone operating at Kylie Jenner's scale is still quietly looking for somewhere that's actually hers, that's not a trend piece, it's a signal. The algorithm is a brilliant distributor and a genuinely poor archive. Sooner or later everyone building on it works out that distribution and ownership were never the same thing. The right move isn't choosing between a newsletter and an archive. It's recognising you probably need both, and starting with whichever gap is actually costing you work right now.

Join the Culo Village to republish the posts you have already distributed as individual web articles, then use Culo Creatives in Canva in one repeatable, sustainable workflow.