Club.com: After Stake and Kick, Bijan Tehrani Is Coming for the Creator Economy

On April 16, 2026, Bijan Tehrani posted three words on X: “Club is live.” No countdown, no product trailer. As usual, the co-founder of Stake.com and Kick preferred to let the move speak for itself.

Behind that economy of words sits something far from ordinary. Club.com — the new platform Tehrani built with long-time partner Ed Craven — opened in early access today, built on a domain the pair purchased for $10 million. The URL was first registered on October 30, 1994. They paid a decade-record sum to pull a 30-year-old premium domain into their orbit — with the same studied nonchalance they brought to challenging Twitch in 2022.

Club positions itself as a creator monetization platform: a place where streamers and content creators can build paid communities, sell exclusive content, and earn recurring revenue from fans even when they’re not broadcasting. The direct competition is Patreon. But the ambition is bigger than that — and so is the baggage.

Who Is Bijan Tehrani?

Tehrani is 34 years old. According to Forbes, his personal net worth sits at around $2.8 billion— placing him on both Australia’s 50 Richest list and the Forbes World’s Billionaires ranking, despite being born in the United States to Iranian refugees who fled after the 1979 revolution. He grew up in Connecticut and relocated permanently to Melbourne around 2016, where his holding company, Easygo Entertainment Pty Ltd, is based.

The origin story is the kind that tech mythology loves. Around 2010, Tehrani and Ed Craven — who would become his co-founder across every venture — met through online gaming forums built around RuneScape, the browser-based MMORPG. They never shook hands, but they shared an obsession with the staking mechanics embedded in online games: wagering virtual items on the outcome of player matches.

That obsession materialized into Primedice in 2013 — a Bitcoin dice game that found early traction among crypto enthusiasts. Four years later, Stake.com followed. The hypothesis was simple: build the most transparent, lowest-edge crypto casino in the world, and let the product market itself. It worked beyond any reasonable projection.

Stake.com: The Engine of Everything

The numbers Stake.com produces are hard to contextualize. In 2024, the platform’s Gross Gaming Revenue reached $4.7 billion, according to figures reported by Forbes and multiple sector analysts — in a global crypto casino market that generated roughly $81.4 billion in GGR across the year (ChainPlay, 2025). Monthly bet volume exceeds $10 billion. SimilarWeb counted over 101 million site visits in February 2026 alone.

Estimated valuation of Easygo, the parent company, ranges between $14 billion and $23.5 billion depending on methodology — making it one of the largest private companies in the global gaming ecosystem. It operates under a Curaçao license, a jurisdiction known for minimal regulatory requirements.

The business model that drove this growth combined a house edge of around 1%, provably-fair blockchain verification for every bet, and an aggressive creator marketing strategy — Drake was one of its most visible ambassadors for years. That marketing strategy, centered on high-visibility streamers, eventually collided with the platform that hosted most of them.

How Kick Was Born — And Why It Matters for Club

On October 18, 2022, Twitch announced a ban on unregulated gambling content. The policy explicitly named Stake.com. For Tehrani and Craven, whose creator marketing pipeline ran almost entirely through Twitch, this was an existential threat. Their response arrived in under two months.

Kick launched in beta in December 2022. The industry laughed. Tehrani himself has acknowledged this, writing on X in July 2025: “Three years ago Twitch banned my co-founder’s account and slashed all creator rev share. In response we launched Kick, which everyone laughed at and said could never rival Twitch. Today Kick reached >25% market share against Twitch for the first time.”

The secret was structural: Kick offered a 95/5 revenue split— 95% of subscription revenue goes to the creator, 5% to the platform. Twitch’s standard is 50/50. The resulting creator migration was significant: xQc signed a $100 million non-exclusive deal, Amouranth reported $38 million earned on the platform. By Q2 2025, Kick crossed 1 billion hours watched. By April 2026, it had 100 million registered users — built on a combined founder investment of nearly $1 billion.

“Ultimately it’s vanity — we aren’t where we need to or should be.”

— Bijan Tehrani, on Kick reaching 100 million users, April 2026

That combination of milestone acknowledgment and blunt self-criticism is characteristic of Tehrani’s public voice. In the same April 2026 letter, he admitted the Kick app “sucks” and confirmed he is personally overseeing a complete rebuild. He also addressed concerns about interface changes: “Don’t worry, we aren’t going to pull a Twitch here and fully TikTokify.”It’s an unusual form of executive communication — and it has consistently built more trust than corporate polish would.

What Club.com Actually Does

Club is not a social network. Tehrani has been explicit: it is not a replacement for streaming, and not an alternative to X. The positioning is narrower and more deliberate — a monetization layer for the moments when creators are not live.

As Tehrani put it at launch, Club is “for creators to build exclusive communities and interact with their viewers, increasing their potential earnings whilst allowing subscribers to access unique behind-the-scenes content.” The platform’s feature set at launch includes:

The platform is global with no geographic restrictions. Mobile apps for Android and iOS arrive “this summer,” per Tehrani. At launch, Club operates in invite-only early access — the team is manually vetting an “influx of creators” who have signed up. Payouts to creators have reportedly already started.

The Logic of the Flywheel

Seen from outside, Club.com is a Patreon competitor. Seen from inside the ecosystem Tehrani has been building since 2017, it is something more deliberate: the final piece of a vertically integrated content and community stack.

Stake.com builds the brand and generates the capital. Kick builds the creator audience — 150,000+ active streamers daily, 5 million+ monthly live streams. Club converts that audience into recurring revenue, independent of broadcast schedules. Creators earn when live on Kick; they earn again when not live on Club.

The $10 million domain purchase carries a specific signal: this is not a side project. A 30-year-old premium URL is a statement of permanence. And the Kick Drops integration — which connects Club subscribers directly to Kick streaming events — suggests the platforms are designed to reinforce each other, not simply coexist.

The Market Club Is Entering

Club launches into a creator subscription market under real pressure. Patreon, which dominated the sector for a decade, has lost creator confidence over rising fees — in part driven by Apple’s 30% in-app purchase tax on iOS subscriptions — and a perceived stagnation in features. Competitors like Passes (10% platform fee), Whop (3%), and Substack for written creators have been gaining ground.

Club’s structural advantage is the audience it already has. It does not need to build a creator base from zero — it has 100 million Kick users and an established streaming community that trusts the 95/5 revenue philosophy. The unanswered question is whether a platform born from a gambling-adjacent ecosystem can attract mainstream creators who want distance from that association. The audience today is predominantly male, 25–34, and gaming-focused. Broadening beyond that cohort is the real product challenge.

The Trust Question

“Will the trust vibe continue with this founder?” — that was the question one X user posted within hours of the Club announcement. It’s not rhetorical.

Tehrani has demonstrated a real capability for building platforms that grow. He’s willing to deploy capital at scale, to admit product failures publicly, and to move fast against incumbents that look unassailable. The candor about Kick’s shortcomings — from the founder himself, not an external critic — is a form of accountability that is genuinely rare in the tech industry.

But Club.com asks creators to stake their communities — and potentially their primary income — inside an ecosystem that has faced a federal lawsuit, active regulatory investigations across multiple jurisdictions, and a moderation failure that cost a man his life. For a mid-tier streamer looking to build sustainable subscription revenue, the question is not just “does Club work?” It’s “do I trust who runs it?” That answer will depend largely on how Kick handles its next 12 months.

What Comes Next

As of today, Club.com is an early-access platform with a limited creator roster, an undisclosed revenue split, and mobile apps still months away. But the infrastructure around it — 100 million Kick users, nearly $1 billion invested by its founders, and a $10 million domain — does not suggest a tentative experiment. It suggests a third bet placed by two founders who have now made two unexpected bets — and won both.

The creator economy in 2026 is searching for platforms that actually understand streamers — not just influencers, not just podcasters, but the specific live-native creators who built communities on Twitch and are still looking for better economics. Club, if the revenue terms are competitive, arrives with better platform understanding of that audience than Patreon has ever had.

Whether Club.com becomes the Patreon for streaming culture depends on terms and behavior that haven’t been revealed yet. What’s already clear is that Tehrani knows how to be in the room where no one expected him.