In July 2025 we stopped selling the product that paid our bills.
It meant walking away from revenue, restructuring the team, and spending months rebuilding without a product to sell, and honestly we didn't know if it would work. I wrote the last two articles about why I believed the model had to change, and this one is about what we actually did about it.
We Were Part of the Friction
The old GRIN required a sales call, a demo, and an annual contract before a brand could get started, which means we were part of the friction I've been writing about, and it was the first thing we got rid of.
Today a brand signs up, tells Gia what it sells and who it wants to reach, and builds its program from there, without a sales call, a demo, or anyone on our team setting up an account.
Over 100 brands are live on the new platform and more launch every day. Some went live in under ten minutes, and roughly one in five of the brands that have launched did it within an hour of signing up. Brands still have decisions to make about their programs, but they no longer have to wait on us.
A Smaller Bet to Start
Creator marketing has always asked brands to commit before they knew whether the channel would work for them, so we created a 30-day free trial and a real free tier, which gives brands the ability to build trust with us before making any commitment.
When you're ready, you stay month to month and pay for the work Gia does on your behalf, like finding creators, reviewing applicants, and keeping your program moving, because we believe we should only charge for what we're good at, not for what you're good at. GRIN takes zero percent of your affiliate sales and zero percent of what you pay your creators, so if your program works we don't get paid more just because your creators sold more. The only thing we pass through is the card or ACH processing fee when you fund your account.
Two Real Customers
During the rebuild an investor group told us we had to pick a side, brands or creators.
Most platforms in this category built for the brand, because that is who pays, and treated creators as supply. But I spent my early twenties as a pro snowboarder on the other side of that relationship, and I know what it feels like to create real value for a brand with no way to see what it's worth. If creators can't build a real career here, brands don't get the creators they need, and the whole market stays small.
We decided to build for both as real customers, so the creator app is free, creators choose the programs they want to join, and they get paid automatically every week with no minimum and without us taking a cut of what they earn. There are now 11,665 creators on the app, and more than 4,000 of them joined in the last 30 days.
Soon creators get a Gia of their own, and I'll share more when it's live.
Trust That Binds Both Sides
Creators can now review the brands they work with, and those reviews become part of a brand's track record on GRIN. When a creator accepts an offer, the terms are frozen, so what was agreed is what gets paid. Deadlines apply to both sides, so if a creator misses a delivery deadline and the grace period after it, the brand can withdraw the offer without owing a cancellation fee, and if a brand sits on submitted work past its review deadline, the work is approved and the creator gets paid.
We hold brands accountable to creators, including our own paying customers.
The Work Itself
The last article opened with a brand telling me "I wish" when I asked if they were actively managing their creator program. They knew what good looked like and just didn't have the hours, and we built Gia to take on that work.
In the last 30 days brands on GRIN reached 17,223 creators with more than 44,000 outreach emails, nearly all of them sent by Gia, and she wrote more than 13,000 daily reviews of how their programs were performing.
The marketer starts the day with a brief of what changed and the three things that most need attention. Creator messages have already been reviewed with replies drafted, and submitted content has been checked against the brief.
Gia runs the outreach and follow-up a brand has approved, and new messages she drafts wait for the marketer's yes. Over the last 90 days, 46 brands and their creators agreed to 618 offers on GRIN.
What Comes Next
We chose to rebuild around these requirements instead of layering them onto the old product, and we are still rebuilding our revenue from the ground up.
Now that the foundation is in place, Gia gets better every day from what live programs teach her. We've also signed a formal partnership with YouTube through YCP and a partnership with TikTok.
There's another part of the original promise we haven't delivered yet, which is connecting the islands. Every platform in this category, including ours for most of its life, rebuilt the full stack for itself, and all that R&D competed instead of compounding. We built the new GRIN to be connected, and the first doors are open. Your team can connect AI tools like Claude to GRIN and read your programs, creators, and results, brands that aren't on Shopify can send us signed order data straight from their own store, and the public API is next.
If you build discovery, payouts, storefronts, or operations tools and see GRIN as competition, I'd rather connect the rest of this category with you, so DM me on LinkedIn and tell me what your customers need that neither of us can give them alone.