Creator marketing is under more scrutiny than ever. In trade press, conference hallways, and budget reviews, the question keeps coming up: is this actually working? It's a fair question. But the industry keeps misreading the answer. Creator marketing isn't failing because the channel is broken. It's failing because no one ever built the foundation to support it.
When it works, creator marketing is one of the highest-leverage channels a brand can run. The people doing this work every day will tell you that. They'll also tell you about the friction.
Brands don't know which creators will deliver. They spray outreach across hundreds of profiles hoping a handful convert. They can't tell in advance whether a partnership is worth the investment. The ones who make it work have dedicated teams, deep expertise, and years of hard-won relationships. Everyone else is guessing.
Creators are guessing too. A creator sees hours of shooting, editing, and posting. A brand sees a gifted product and exposure. Neither side is wrong, and neither has a shared framework to close the gap. Creators try to carry a rate from brand to brand, and their first-party performance data is their real reputation. But sharing that reputation today is clunky, manual, and easy to ignore. The ones who succeed are the ones with the most grit, the most connections, or the most luck. Everyone else stays small or gives up.
If you ask almost anyone in this industry how they'd describe the state of it, they'll say the same thing: it's the wild wild west. That phrase has been used for years, as if it's just the nature of the category. I don't see it that way. I see it as an admission that we've underdelivered, and not just GRIN. The entire technology industry that was supposed to serve this market. We built tools, charged fees, and grew fast, but we didn't build the thing this market actually needs.
Without it, most of the value in the creator economy is unrecognized.
What is holding us back
The creator economy is a natural two-sided marketplace. Clear supply: creators with audiences, influence, and content. Clear demand: brands that need authentic distribution and marketing they can trust. The economics work and the incentives are aligned, yet the market operates as if neither side trusts the other, because in most cases, they don't.
On the brand side, most partnerships start with incomplete information. Brands can't tell with confidence which creators will drive results, whether they'll deliver reliably, or whether the investment will pay for itself. Running a creator program still requires sourcing, outreach, negotiating, tracking, measuring, and retention. It's a full-time operation. Brands that have the resources can pull it off. Brands that don't, often can't.
This is what makes creator marketing different from every other channel that scales. In paid media, you're buying a placement. You control the target, the budget, and the creative. A couple of experts, a credit card, and data. Creator marketing is the opposite. You're choosing a person, and every creator you add is operational complexity you can't shortcut. The channel scales linearly, not exponentially.
On the creator's side, the problem is a mirror image. To be successful today, a creator has to operate a business. Most of them manage that side in-house, and the process is manual and unsupported. Even top earners with managers or agencies are stitching together spreadsheets, DMs, and memory. It's not that creators lack hustle, but rather no one has built them a system. They source their own deals, negotiate their own rates, review their own contracts, track their own performance, and rebuild their reputation from scratch with every new brand.
Follower count and engagement rates tell a brand almost nothing about how a creator will perform for their business. Creators don't want to be reduced to vanity metrics either. This isn't an attribution problem to solve with better math, it's a trust problem. Brands need enough signal, shared openly, to have confidence the relationship is working and worth compounding.
Why a decade of innovation didn't fix it
There has been no shortage of effort in this space. I want to be honest about that.
GRIN was a rocket ship in 2020 and 2021. We were a pioneer and leader in creator management. We built a product that helped brands run programs at a scale that hadn't been possible before. But our story didn't continue up and to the right. It stalled, and then it declined.
We'd built a great product, but not a durable business. Along the way we made real mistakes. Aggressive sales processes, rigid contracts, product bugs, faltering customer service. We lost a lot of customers, and it's a scar we have to bear if we're going to earn back what we once had.
But the real problem was deeper. We started by serving brands that already ran successful creator programs, and we were good at that. We never evolved to help brands launch new ones. Despite everything we tried, about 40% of our customers would churn and we couldn't fix it under the previous model. We could tell within 30 to 60 days of onboarding whether a brand would succeed, but we couldn't determine it in advance. This meant the real problem wasn't execution, it was coupled to our product and business model.
This wasn't unique to GRIN either. The entire technology industry approached the creator economy in a similar way: build a SaaS tool, charge a subscription, layer on performance fees, and grow as fast as possible. All of it was oriented around brand spend. Creators were treated as interchangeable supply, as inventory to be optimized rather than a side of the market worth investing in. They got brought into the system but never truly supported by it.
After GRIN's stumble, a new generation of companies stepped in and made real progress. They built leaner affiliate models that lowered the barrier to entry. They gave creators storefronts that made affiliate sales feel less transactional. They saw problems in the first generation and fixed them. I give them credit for that. But affiliate is one piece of the value chain, not the whole thing. Facilitating a link is not the same as supporting a creator operationally. Connecting a brand to a creator is not the same as helping them build a relationship at scale.
Now it's 2026, and brands still describe this market as chaotic. Creators still feel unsupported. The money flowing into creator marketing keeps growing, but the number of people who can run it well hasn't kept pace. The top 10% of creators still earn the majority of the income. Nearly half earn almost nothing. The creator middle class everyone predicted would emerge remains more aspiration than reality.
I keep coming back to one question: why?
Because every generation of tools, including GRIN, made the workflows slightly easier but none of them changed the equation. For brands, running a creator program still requires significant operational investment, deep expertise, and dedicated headcount. Tools can make the people faster, but the people are still the bottleneck. For creators, the operational burden of running a business as a prerequisite for participation has never been reduced. Tools made some tasks easier, but the grind of being a creator-entrepreneur didn't change. The guessing, the operational burden, and the trust gap remain because no one built the experience that would actually resolve them.
What has to change
The friction has to come down for both sides. Shopify is the clearest example of what that looks like. Before Shopify, if you wanted to sell things online, you had to be a developer or hire one. There was plenty of demand, but the operational cost and complexity of becoming a merchant held everyone back. Shopify solved that by building the experience that made selling online simple and extensible. As millions of merchants used it, the data, the integrations, and the ecosystem that emerged underneath became the infrastructure that others built on.
The creator economy needs the same shift. The guessing, the operational burden, and the trust gap will not get solved by incrementally better tools. They will get solved by an experience that offers zero friction, enabling a brand and creator to start small, test what works, and scale as they see results. The operational complexity that currently requires dedicated people or agencies gets absorbed by AI that can do the work around the clock. Time to value drops. Costs drop. And the number of brands and creators who can succeed grows by orders of magnitude.
What we believe
We've been quiet for the past year. We made hard decisions, cut deep, and invested everything into building something new. Before we show you what we've built, I want to be clear about what we believe. These aren't aspirations, they are design decisions. Every one of them is built into what we are shipping.
We believe brands and creators should not be taxed on performance. Right now, most platforms charge creators a cut of their sales and charge brands performance fees on top of a subscription. Both sides pay more as they scale. That works when programs are small. It becomes a wall when they grow. The right model charges for platform value, not the outcomes that brands and creators produce together.
We believe trust is built through shared data. Brands guess which creators will perform and creators guess which brands are worth their time. Neither side has the signal to know. That changes when first-party transaction data is captured and shared openly within the platform. As that data accumulates, so does confidence. Over time, an extensible model can carry those trust signals across platforms, so track records travel and reputation compounds.
We believe the platform has to be extensible. Every company in this space fights for the same customers and the same budget. They partner when it suits them and compete when it doesn't. They call themselves platforms but ship closed products. The right model is open and extensible by design. As the network grows, the foundation underneath it grows with it. What starts as a platform can become the infrastructure the market runs on.
Where we go from here
I opened by saying that the people questioning the channel are misreading the answer. I believe that. Creator marketing isn't failing. It's being held back by the absence of a foundation that would let it work the way a real market should.
We've spent the last year building that foundation. Not iterating on what we had. Building something new. Soon we'll have a lot more to share about what it is, how it works, and what it means for brands and creators who have been waiting for this market to grow up. We're ready to show you.