Your first sealed post

This one is for creators. Not for the backer deciding whether to stake or the bonder pricing a position; the rest of the series walks those seats. This is for the person with the work in hand and an audience somewhere else, wondering what would actually happen if they sealed something here. The about page covers the network itself.

Why a sealed post instead of a subscription?

A subscription asks your audience for a relationship: a monthly promise, cancelled in some settings page months later, priced low because it never ends. Most work does not arrive monthly. It arrives as moments, and the moment has a shape: a public part that builds the want, and a payoff that resolves it.

A sealed post prices the moment instead of the relationship. One post, one payoff, one set of terms, and then it is over. Nobody is managing a commitment, and you are not feeding a treadmill to justify a recurring charge.

Two properties make it a fair ask of an audience that has never paid you before. First, the crowdfund mode is all-or-nothing: backing places a hold, not a charge, and a campaign that misses its goal charges nobody at all. Asking costs your audience nothing unless enough of them wanted it. Second, you set what you receive and receive 100% of it. openmog’s fee, 10% of each payment with a 75 cent minimum, is included in the price the payer sees, not deducted from you, and the number on their confirm button is their whole charge.

What should you seal first?

Seal work that is already reveal-shaped: a tease that stands on its own, and a payoff that pays it off. You almost certainly have some lying around.

• The ending of the story you have been serializing in public.
• The full track behind the clip that did numbers.
• The spreadsheet, the sources and the working behind an analysis you summarized.
• The answer to the question your replies keep asking.
• The full set the preview photo came from.

The test is whether the public half creates the want by itself. If the tease needs your name to be interesting, it is not ready; if the tease makes a stranger lean in, it will make your existing audience reach for a card. And seal the payoff only: everything you leave public is what travels, gets replied to, and does the selling.

Which mode should your first post use?

One question picks the mode: do you want the payload public in the end? A crowdfund opens it for everyone at once, including the people who paid nothing, which makes the reveal a community moment your whole audience shares. Pay to reveal keeps it private, one buyer at a time, with no deadline, which makes it a price that keeps earning long after the post has scrolled away. The reveal post walks that mode in detail.

For a first post, the crowdfund is usually the better opening move. It gives your audience a collective thing to do together, the live meter gives them a reason to share the link for you, and a met goal is a public win they were part of rather than a purchase they made alone. The bonus is off by default; turn it on if you want early backing to feel safe, and that seat has its own post.

What does your audience actually pay?

Backing is a hold: it reserves the stake on the card without charging it, and the outcome decides everything. A backer who stakes $5 counts the full $5.00 toward your goal and their card pays $5.75, captured only if the goal is met; on a miss they pay nothing and the hold is released. On a reveal there is no outcome to wait for, so a $7 price charges the buyer $7.78 on the spot and credits you the full $7.00.

Your side mirrors it. A funded crowdfund credits you the goal minus whatever bonus pool filled: in the series’ worked example, a $100 goal with a full $25 pool leaves the creator $75.00, and with the bonus off the same goal pays the whole $100.00. Credits land as pending, become withdrawable seven days later, and withdrawals start at $50. The FAQ carries the longer version of every money answer.

The practical limits, so nothing surprises you when you open the composer. Goals run from $20 to $1,000 and a crowdfund runs one hour to five days, while reveal prices and stakes run from $5 to $1,000.

Do you need an audience here first?

No, and this is the part most platforms get backwards. A sealed post is a public page with a tease and a live panel showing its terms, and the link works wherever your audience already lives: a bio, a caption, a newsletter, a server. People who tap it read the tease without an account and sign in only at the moment they put money down. The post does not need the network to function; the network is what it gets to keep afterward, in the replies, the likes and the profile that now has a reason to exist.

And the seal is real. The payload is never sent to a browser that has not unlocked it, and search indexes only the public parts, so it can show people your post exists without ever having read what is inside. The series overview covers how that holds.

How do you run it?

1. Write the post and attach the media, the payoff included.
2. Seal the parts that are the payoff. Everything unmarked stays public as the tease.
3. Pick the mode and the terms: a goal and a deadline, or a price. The composer shows the all-in numbers your audience will see before you commit to anything.
4. Post it, then share the link where your audience already is.
5. Watch the panel. It shows the same live progress to you, your backers and everyone deciding whether to join.

Or start by watching someone else’s: the sealed feed shows every campaign running right now. And if you are bringing an audience and want a hand with your first one, write to support@openmog.com and we will set it up with you.