Before I was a tech CEO, I was a professional snowboarder. From about 18 to 21, I was sponsored by Rossignol, DC, GMC, and Blindside. I shot video parts, traveled to contests, and showed up at community events. People trusted me, but the value of that trust wasn't measured. There was no follower count, no attribution, no way to know what my influence was actually worth. I loved every second of it. Free gear, some travel expenses, but not enough to support a family.
Social media didn't exist yet, but the dynamic was the same. Today we call it creator marketing. It is now twenty years later and the infrastructure to turn influence into a real career still barely exists. And that's what brought me to GRIN.
Creator marketing outperforms every other channel when it works. The people running it well will tell you that. They'll also tell you it's the hardest channel to run at scale. The economics are there, the audiences are there, the demand from brands keeps growing year over year. But most brands still can't make it work consistently, and most creators still can't make it a career.
The industry calls it the wild wild west. I call it an admission that we, the technology companies that were supposed to solve this, have underdelivered.
Every other marketing channel gives you efficiency at scale. Paid media is a credit card, a couple of experts, and data. Creator marketing requires making decisions about people. You can influence the output but you can't control it, and the more you try, the less authentic it becomes. Every creator you add is another relationship to manage. Ten creators is ten relationships. A hundred is a hundred. The complexity actually increases with scale, and nothing anyone has built in the last decade has changed that.
Why a decade of innovation didn't fix it
There's been no shortage of effort. I want to be honest about that, starting with us.
GRIN was the OG. We helped brands run creator programs at a scale nobody else could. But we focused on brands that already knew how to run creator marketing, and when we expanded beyond them, roughly half of the new customers failed. We could tell within 30 to 60 days of onboarding whether a brand would succeed, but we couldn't determine it in advance.
While we were trying to solve churn, competitors caught up and started fighting for the same set of brands. None of us figured out how to grow the TAM. And while we were all fighting over brands, nobody was building for the creator side at all. We made it worse by trying to grow through our problems. For GRIN, three rounds of layoffs, frustrated customers, and declining growth. Mistakes that broke trust with brands who'd believed in us. I won't pretend they didn't happen. If you were a GRIN customer during that period, you know.
This isn't just our story. A banker who covers our space recently confirmed what we'd been seeing: none of the major players are growing meaningfully. High acquisition costs, poor retention, difficulty proving ROI. The stagnation is a category story, not only a GRIN story.
And that stagnation created an opening. A new generation of companies stepped in and made real progress. They built leaner affiliate models, gave creators storefronts, lowered the barrier to entry. I give them credit for that. But affiliate is one piece of the value chain, and every new platform that gets built is its own island. Its own closed ecosystem, its own silo of data and relationships.
All the R&D in this category is competing instead of compounding. Discovery, sourcing, vetting, campaign management, content tracking, creator payments. Every company rebuilds the entire stack from scratch because there's nothing underneath to build on.
What Shopify understood that we didn't
Shopify didn't invent commerce, it lowered the barrier to becoming a merchant. Before Shopify, the cost of selling online was high, so the number of merchants was artificially small. Shopify didn't fight for share of that small TAM, it made it bigger. And its greatest moat didn't turn out to be its tooling. It was the developer and merchant network, both incentivized to build and grow on top of the platform. Shopify became infrastructure that others could extend.
The creator economy has the same structural constraint, but everyone is focused on serving existing supply and demand. Nobody's trying to grow it.
Not everyone has an Instagram, TikTok, or YouTube following, but everyone influences purchase decisions. The friend who recommended those running shoes. The coworker who changed what tool your whole team uses. Most of the influence that actually drives commerce happens in private conversations, not on social platforms. The creator economy as it exists today captures a fraction of that. It rewards the top 10% and ignores everyone else.
Shopify proved what this looks like. Many of the DTC brands that need creator marketing today exist because Shopify made it possible to start selling in the first place. It lowered the barrier, and the supply side exploded. Right now, succeeding as a creator requires raw talent, capital, connections, and a willingness to be an entrepreneur. If we make it easier for creators to succeed, the supply side will grow by an order of magnitude.
And when it does, the brands that win will be the ones with products people actually want to talk about. Goodbye companies with great marketing and mediocre products. Hello companies with great products that never had the budget or team to run a creator program. The channel is a quality filter. When more people can access it, the market gets better, not just bigger.
What we learned
When I took over as CEO in early 2025, one of our board directors challenged me with a question: how do you get rid of the friction? How does this channel scale the way paid media scales? We had already tried an incremental path by offering better data, education, and community resources, but it barely moved the needle. Half of our customers were still failing, and no amount of product improvement was going to change that.
I spent months obsessing over this question. Why weren't the tools enough? I went back through every customer that failed, every creator that gave up, every deal that fell apart. The same problems kept showing up, and it wasn't any single workflow. It was the foundation underneath all of them.
Creator marketing gets more complex with scale. The marketing channels that capture the most budget do so because once you figure out what works, you can scale it by simply increasing spend. Creator marketing is not the same. More budget means more creator relationships, which means more operational complexity. To thrive as a channel, the opposite needs to be true. Managing a hundred creators shouldn't feel fundamentally different from managing ten.
The technology platforms artificially limit participation. Affiliate platforms charge a percentage of every sale. The better you perform, the more they take. SaaS platforms lock you into rigid contracts and large fees before you've seen any value. Neither model is optimized for the customer. Either they take a percentage of the value you are creating, or they limit who can participate with a high barrier of entry. And I fully admit GRIN was part of the problem.
Creator marketing has no system to promote trust and accountability. Commerce has product reviews. Services have ratings and referrals. As markets grow, trust systems emerge because they have to. The creator economy runs on social platform metrics and siloed attribution data. One of the most experienced influencer marketers I know told me: "I can look at someone and tell if they'll work. And if I'm not sure, I message a buddy at another brand." The data doesn't travel, and until it does, the complexity and cost problems can't be solved.
Once I saw these problems clearly, I couldn't unsee them. Creator marketing is the only channel where real people talk about products to audiences that trust them. The potential is word of mouth marketing at scale. No algorithm, no ad unit, no amount of paid media can replicate that.
But despite increasing investment by brands, the trajectory was not aligned with that future. To reach that potential, we had to rethink from first principles and be willing to rebuild. Which is why we stopped pushing our legacy product in July 2025 and restructured the entire business to build the foundation the category so desperately needs.
What we're doing about it
By starting over, we had the opportunity to address the complexity problem through advances in AI. We finally have the technology to automate the operational work that prevents brands and creators from succeeding at scale. But this technology can't simply be layered on top of legacy platforms. It has to be built into the foundation.
By starting over, we had the opportunity to reinvent how we price, this time focused on lowering risk and increasing participation. You should be able to start for free, see value, and scale at your pace. We should only charge you for what we're good at, not what you're good at. We earn by delivering real work, not by taxing outcomes you create.
And finally, by starting over, we had the opportunity to make trust and accountability a core part of the platform, built for both brands and creators. Rather than building one more closed ecosystem, we're building infrastructure designed to be extended and connected. The kind of foundation the creator economy has needed for a decade.
If I'm going to fight for GRIN and this category, it has to be worth fighting for. Someone is going to build this foundation. The creator economy is too big and too broken for it not to happen. I can't imagine a more exciting problem than being the ones who do, making people the most powerful force in marketing again, and helping the companies with the best products win.