Essay

Artificial Scarcity Damages the Creator Economy

Arvid Kahl · The Bootstrapped Founder Free Intermediate

Before you copy a waitlist because everyone else has one, read Arvid Kahl's honest counterpoint on manufactured scarcity. His point cuts to it: gating something you could ship to everyone can win a short-term spike while quietly eroding the trust you actually need. He is fair about it too, naming the cases where limited access is real (a cohort course, a pre-sale that funds the build) versus theatre.

• Fake scarcity buys a one-time bump and can cost you the long-term relationship. Fabricated urgency is usually obvious to the people you most want to keep.
• Gating a digital product with near-zero marginal cost is hard to justify unless the constraint (your attention, your capacity) is genuinely real.
• An abundance mindset, building trust over manufacturing FOMO, tends to compound better than scarcity tactics do.