Friction Debt: Why Most Creators Stall Before They Start

Every January, the same advice floods the internet: pick your niche, be consistent, build your personal brand.

It's not wrong. But it ignores context entirely and ends up useless.

I've watched a lot of people try to "become creators" over the past few years. The ones who stalled didn't lack ideas or talent. They stalled in decision-fatigue. Which platform? What format? How do I even publish this thing?

The creator economy crossed $200 billion recently. There's never been more opportunity, or more garbage. And the garbage isn't just bad content. It's the overwhelming noise of options, tools, and strategies that bury new creators before they publish a single piece.

Here's what I've learned: the creators who ship consistently aren't more disciplined than everyone else. They've engineered lower resistance. They removed friction from their process until publishing became the path of least resistance.

Removing friction enables momentum.

And momentum is what you need to start from zero today.

How Friction Compounds

Most people think of friction as inconvenience. A small annoyance. Something you push through with enough motivation.

That's not how friction actually works.

Friction compounds. Each small decision you haven't made sits in working memory, creating cognitive load that makes the next decision harder. So you're not only facing one obstacle, you're facing a stack of them, and they multiply rather than add.

Psychologist Barry Schwartz documented this in his research on the paradox of choice. More options don't create freedom. They create paralysis. When faced with too many possibilities, people either choose poorly, choose nothing, or choose and immediately regret it. The mental energy spent evaluating options depletes the energy available for action.

Now map this to the creator journey. Before you write a single word, you face a sequence of unmade decisions.

Platform choice:

Should I start a blog? A newsletter? Post on social media? All three? Each option has advocates swearing it's the only path that works.

Tool selection:

If a blog, which platform? WordPress? Ghost? Webflow? Squarespace? If a newsletter, Substack or Beehiiv or ConvertKit? Each tool has tradeoffs you'd need to research to understand.

Format decision:

Long-form or short-form? Written or video? Polished or raw? The "right" answer depends on factors you can't know until you've already started.

Publishing logistics:

Once you've written something, how do you actually get it live? Where does it go? How do you make it look decent?

Four unmade decisions. But they don't add to 4x friction. They multiply. You're carrying all four in your head while trying to write your first sentence. The weight of the unmade choices presses down on the work itself.

I call this:

Friction Debt.

Like technical debt in software; where shortcuts today create compounding problems tomorrow – friction debt accumulates interest. The longer decisions stay unmade, the heavier they feel. The more you research, the more options you discover, and the more the debt grows. Eventually, the backlog becomes so daunting that abandoning the whole project feels easier than facing it.

This is why so many creator journeys end before they begin. As a result of friction debt that was never acknowledged, never audited, and never paid down.

Why "Just Start" Fails

The standard advice for new creators is simple: just start.

It sounds empowering. Stop overthinking. Stop planning. Take action.

But this advice assumes a clear starting line. It assumes you know where to stand, which direction to face, and that someone has already fired the gun. For most new creators, none of that is true.

Creator mediums in 2026

• You could write a blog.
• Or a newsletter.
• Or post threads on X.
• Or write an X Article, like this one.
• Or make TikToks.
• Or try live shopping.
• Or start a podcast.
• Or do all of them and "repurpose."

Each platform has its own rules. Each format has its own learning curve. And every guru has a different opinion on which one matters most.

"Just start" becomes "just decide everything first, then start." The starting line itself requires fifteen preliminary decisions. You can't take action until you've resolved them, but resolving them feels like its own massive project.

The guru advice compounds the problem. Every creator educator has a different stack recommendation, a different "best platform for 2026," a different content strategy that definitely works. Consuming this advice doesn't reduce friction – it adds options. More options means more friction. You finish a YouTube video about the best newsletter platforms and you're further from publishing than when you started.

So what happens? You spend 3 weeks researching platforms. You set up accounts on 4 of them. You publish once, get minimal response, and quietly abandon the whole thing by February.

A predictable outcome of high-friction systems. You burned your motivation on decisions, not creation. By the time you sat down to write, you had nothing left.

The creators who make it past this phase had less to decide.

The Friction Audit

Before I tell you what tools to use, I want to give you a way to diagnose your own friction.

The 3 Friction Audit Questions

1): Where did you last stop?

The point where you stalled reveals the friction type.

If you stalled before writing anything, you have ideation friction – too many possibilities, no clear angle.

If you stalled with a draft sitting in a Google Doc, you have publishing friction – the logistics of getting it live felt like a separate project.

If you stalled after publishing once or twice, you have distribution friction – the work went out but nothing came back, and the silence killed your momentum.

Each friction type has different solutions. Knowing which one stopped you matters more than generic advice about consistency.

2): What decision are you avoiding?

There's usually one unmade choice blocking everything downstream.

Maybe you haven't committed to a platform.

Maybe you haven't decided whether you're building a personal brand or a company presence.

Maybe you haven't chosen a format.

Name the decision. Avoiding it only makes it grow.

3): What would you need to publish something in 20 minutes?

It doesn't have to be perfect. An idea you've been thinking about, turned into a published piece, in twenty minutes or less.

The gap between your current setup and that answer is = friction debt. If the answer is "I'd need to figure out where to post it, how to format it, whether to include images, how to make it not look terrible..." then your friction debt is high. If the answer is "I'd open my editor and start typing," your friction debt is low.

This reframes the problem, and instead of thinking you lack discipline or focus, you realize it's: a systems problem, and systems problems have systems solutions.

The Minimum Viable Creator Stack

With your friction diagnosed, here's the stack I'd recommend for starting from scratch. 3 layers. Each one chosen specifically because it eliminates decisions rather than adding them.

Layer 1: A home you own (Ghost)

Before you post anywhere, you need a place that belongs to you. Social profiles are rented real estate. Eventually, you'll want to own.

Ghost is where I'd start. It's an independent publishing platform – open source, built specifically for creators and writers. You can run a blog, a newsletter, or both from the same place. The free tier lets you publish and send emails without paying anything until you're ready to grow.

Why this matters for friction: Ghost removes 3 decisions at once.

1. You don't need to choose between a blog platform and an email platform – it's both.
2. You don't need to evaluate landing page builders – Ghost pages work fine.
3. You don't need to figure out how your pieces will look – the default themes are clean enough to start.

I can't remember how much time I've spent evaluating "landing page" builders, "funnel" makers, and no-code website tools. For one reason or another, I kept coming back to Ghost because it's simple. The editor is intuitive, almost like a focus mode. Any page you create feels clean by default. And emails are built in, which means one less integration to configure.

Setup takes about 15 minutes.

1. Pick a subdomain
2. Choose a theme
3. You have a live publication.

One decision, made once, and publishing friction drops dramatically.

Layer 2: A way to capture interest (Tally)

Once you're publishing, you need a way to turn readers into subscribers – and eventually, into a community you can learn from.

Tally is the simplest form builder I've found. It's free, offers unlimited responses, and you can embed forms directly into your Ghost site so they look native to your brand. (For context: Typeform offers 10 responses/month on the free plan. Tally offers unlimited responses on the free plan).

To integrate both Tally and Ghost:

1. Create one form. A simple "join the list" or "tell me what you're working on" prompt.
2. Embed it on your about page or at the end of your first post.
3. Connect Tally to Ghost through Zapier.

Now anyone who fills out your form automatically gets added to your Ghost membership list.

You've just built a lead capture system that runs itself. For free. More importantly, you've eliminated the entire category of "how do I grow my list" friction. The system handles it.

You focus on writing.

Layer 3: A way to think faster (Claude)

The hardest part of creating (and if you're like me) is the blank page.

I use Claude to think through ideas with me.

1. When I have a rough angle, I talk it through.
2. When I'm stuck on structure, I ask for options.
3. When I've written a draft, I ask what's missing.
4. When I reference research, I get the source links.

Some writers argue this is lazy. I think they're missing the point.

In 2026, everyone has access to the same AI tools. The barrier to generating text is zero. The question then becomes "how to use them without losing what makes your work yours".

For me, the answer is using Claude as a thinking partner, as opposed to a ghostwriter. I ask it to help to connect certain ideas I never knew how to connect in words but they were images in my head. That's a different relationship, and it removes the specific friction of staring at a blank page with no idea where to start.

What this stack doesn't include

• You won't have scheduling tools.
• You won't access complex analytics (even though Ghost has useful analytics).
• You will not have complex automations beyond the single Tally-to-Ghost connection.

Whatever needs to exist to prevent more friction.

Every tool you add is a tool you have to learn, configure, and maintain. Every dashboard is a place to check and potentially obsess over. Every automation is a potential breaking point.

The minimum viable stack includes only what you need to go from idea to published piece to captured subscriber. Everything else is future you's problem, and future 'you' will have more information about what actually matters.

The Feedback Loop

When friction drops low enough, something shifts.

• Low friction means more publishing.
• More publishing means faster feedback.
• Faster feedback means better ideas, because you're learning what resonates instead of guessing.
• Better ideas mean more motivation.
• More motivation means more publishing.

The system becomes self-sustaining.

Each output generates the input for the next cycle.

This is where Tally forms become more than lead capture.

A simple question "what do you want to learn about?" gives you your next topic. Reader responses reveal which angles landed and which fell flat. You stop guessing what to create because your audience tells you. The blank page stops being blank because you're responding to real questions from real people.

But this only works if you publish enough to generate data. High-friction systems never reach this stage. They die in the decision phase, before the first feedback loop can form.

That's the real cost of friction debt. It's not just that you publish less. It's that you never reach the phase where publishing gets easier.

What Friction Remains

I won't pretend this is a complete playbook.

This stack solves publishing friction – the resistance between having an idea and having a live piece. It doesn't solve attention friction, which is the challenge of getting discovered when you're starting from zero. Ghost and Tally don't bring eyeballs. They just make sure you're ready when eyeballs arrive.

It also doesn't solve consistency friction – the challenge of showing up repeatedly over months and years. That's a habit problem more than a tools problem, though lower publishing friction makes the habit easier to maintain.

Distribution is still the open question. Getting eyes on your work, especially early, requires showing up somewhere with built-in discovery. X, LinkedIn, YouTube. That part still takes consistent effort and, honestly, a willingness to be a beginner in public (hey that's me).

The approach I've described optimizes for one specific friction type. The other types are real, and I'm documenting what I learn about them as I go. If you're reading this article, you're watching that process happen in real time.

In Closing

The creator economy in 2026 is massive. The opportunities are real – I see them every day. But most people won't take advantage of them, because they never get past the setup phase. They drowned in friction debt before publishing their first piece. It is my goal this year to help at least one person get past this friction.

If that's been you, try this:

Ghost for publishing. Tally for capture. Claude for thinking.

All free to start (Claude grows on you and the $20 Pro might be worth it). All simple enough to launch this week.

The principle matters more than the specific tools: reduce decisions to increase output. Audit your friction. Pay down the debt. Make publishing the path of least resistance.

The best strategy is the one that gets you to publish.

Everything else comes after.

What kind of friction do you struggle with the most? Let me know below.