Why Most Creator Brands Fail (And How to Fix It) with Aaron Day of Amaze | CREATOR COMMERCE S1E10

0:00So if I look back to maybe two or three years ago, it might have taken on average two to three months for a creator to really get a store live and built and beautiful. Today, it's taking five days, you know, all in.

0:11Ian Shepherd:Today on The Business of Creators, I talked to Amaze CEO Aaron Day about the tools that are helping creators sell products easier and faster than ever before. We're using AI to look at the fan base, look at the fan data, and try to create lookalike audiences of buyers and then suggest that to the creator. And so we have integrations with over 50 ,000 custom manufacturers. We drop you into this onboarding cycle where we gather information from you and then we help you launch your first product. Aaron lays out some clear practical steps that creators can take to succeed in today's market. If you want to be successful, you have to promote.

0:52If you integrate your store, you're going to get like 7x more revenue because the store rides along with the content. And some killer case studies. Those products became part of the community and she had like 60 % of the community buy those products. It was fantastic.

1:07Ian Shepherd:If you want to earn revenue selling products, you absolutely don't want to miss this episode.

1:19Ian Shepherd:Before we dive into today's episode, let's talk about what happens when you've developed a winning product. Once you've built something amazing, you need a trusted, lasting place to promote it. And that starts with your domain name. A.store domain is a branded, commerce-focused web address that tells your audience, this is where I sell. It boosts click-through rate by nearly 90 % and doubles organic visibility, all while staying platform-independent and fully owned by you. And so whether you're building your first course or your 10th product line, give your brand a domain name that's built to sell.

1:52Ian Shepherd:Get yours today by using my special link in the description. Right, let's get on with the show. So what's the biggest shift you've seen in how creators launch products in 2025? Great question, Ian. So there's two really, really big shifts. So the first shift is sort of the timing of the creation of the product design. What we're seeing a lot this year so far is there's so many new tools coming out to where a creator can create video content, and then they can drop that video content into some sort of AI engine. And that AI engine will then submit to them a lot of examples of products that they might want to represent based on how that video is interpreted by the AI engine.

2:36And so what it's doing is it's giving the creator a lot of really fun sort of idea generation and real life form of products. And then the other – so it's interesting. It's still a bit authentic in how it happens because it is taking that video content and suggesting things. And then the creator starts from that point and moves on. But what's also happening, which is a huge relief to us, because we've worked so hard on this, is that we're finally starting to see creators really think about the audience data. For so long, they would come into our platform. They would say, I want to make some money.

3:14I want to sell something. And they would just create a T-shirt, right? And they wouldn't – it would be some weird design, something that they did on our platform or in Adobe or whatever, and just put it out there. And then they would get all sad that nothing happened. But now what they're doing, they're actually saying, hey, can you give us some data on our fan base, on our users? What are they like? Who are they? So you're seeing the intelligence and sort of the maturity of creators improve quite a bit. And they're starting to use the tools that are really cool this year to help them as well.

3:47We still aren't there when it comes to the idea of building a brand quite. You know, there's still a lot of maturity that has to happen in helping a creator actually become a brand. But we are seeing a pretty big shift in how a product is launched, right, and how a product is created.

4:06Ian Shepherd:That's very exciting. Well, I'm really keen to get into some of the detail of that. But before I do, I know you work with all sorts of creators. If a creator came to you today and said, I want to launch a product, what advice would you give them? Okay, great, great question. So two pieces of advice. So first thing is, I would say, give us or someone else, but give us all of your social media handles and let us run them through a tool and tell you what your audience looks like, right? We can take all those social handles. We can go back six months and look at all the audience data and we can tell you, hey, look, we think your audience looks like this.

4:42And then we can say, based on other lookalike audiences that we have that are in a similar genre, this is what they're buying, right? This is what, so we would ask them to listen a bit, right? The second thing, and probably the most important thing we'd tell them is like, look, we have 13 million creator stores, five to 8 ,000 people a day sign up on our platform. If you want to be successful, you have to promote. This idea that's been sort of out there for the last three or four years that we want to monetize, but we don't wanna promote. There's, for whatever reason, this concept of like, hey, I'm a creator, I'm creating content, but I don't wanna sell to my audience.

5:17It's not authentic, just doesn't work. Right. I mean, if you if you want to have success, you've got to promote the product. Right. And so so you've you've got to make sure that you you you design you design the right product, what they want to sell. And there's a huge, huge catalog of things you can you can create and sell today. But then, you know, think about your promotion plan and and and be willing to promote. If you if you tell me you're not going to promote it, you're not going to integrate it on your site. Then your chances of success are very, very small. Right. So, yeah.

5:48Ian Shepherd:Yeah, that makes absolute sense. And as someone who works with creators every day, I really know and believe that you've touched on sort of the promotion. But in terms of the hallmarks of a great creator brand, what other attributes or characteristics do they typically have? Yeah, so a little bit of context here. So we have creators that have 500 followers on YouTube, and we've got creators that have 20 million followers on YouTube, Instagram, TikTok, whatever. So we've got the whole gamut, right? Let's talk about first the ones that have under a million followers. So we're seeing huge amounts of success with the creators that have 10 ,000 to 20 ,000 followers that have a really, really engaged community.

6:27And so what's interesting is that those creators are sort of collaborating with the community on what they should build. So what we see happen, it's really, really beautiful. You watch it. I've got an example. There's a creator. Her brand on YouTube is called Howie the Crab. So she basically had this really interesting crab that she had as a pet, and she was a storyteller. And she basically created content about the life and challenges of this crab. And it was really, really fun to watch. You would think it would be targeted towards, you know, children, but it was the fan base was was was very adult and watching the experience and the way she told the story.

7:04She had about 15 ,000 followers during the life of this first first sort of campaign, right, of this content she was creating. The community was very engaged. They were asking lots of questions. She she weaved into those questions, like how to engage them, how to include them, how to bring them into the experience. And as she created products, and it was very methodical, those products became part of the community. And she had like 60 % of the community buy those products. It was fantastic, right? So the idea of doing it with your community, with your audience, and doing it together is performing very, very well right now with the smaller, the more micro and smaller size creators out there, right?

7:48One thing to remember, too, is that a lot of the micro creators are small brands. They're yoga instructors. They're health enthusiasts. They're service providers. They may be small restaurants or bars or whatever. And so they're really emphasizing the sense of community. Now, when you get to the bigger creators, they know the algorithms. They know how the platforms run. They know how to optimize their AdSense revenue. I mean, they really are smart at playing the game inside of the platform, right? And so what you can see there, and we've seen some huge successes and huge misses where those creators come in and they need to be focused on building a brand.

8:29Here's a stat, Ian, that I think you'll find funny. So in the last 12 months, we've had creators come into our platform and create 35 million unique products. We've had out of those creators coming into our platform, they've created 1.5 million stores. So think about that. So they've come in and there's this moment in time where they feel some fame, something just happened, and they create a product and they do a drop, right? And they try to make some quick revenue. But a million and a half times they've come in, they've created a store, they started to build a brand, right? As a larger creator, if you're not focused on building a brand and think about that process, you just aren't going to have the success.

9:10And we're seeing it over and over again. And you might have a one-hit wonder for a little bit and then it goes away. But if you truly think about a brand, the reason that's important is when you think about a brand, you're thinking about a product lifecycle. You're thinking about an image lifecycle. And that's fun to watch for us. We watched really successful larger creators come in. And most of them, to be fair, most of them have an agency that's trying to help them a bit. But you see them, if they do well, they do that. If they don't do well, it's because they just sort of expected their community to want to buy something from them.

9:46And it really just wasn't real enough. It wasn't authentic enough, right? Because there's no brand relationship. And I'll give you some other examples. But like one of my favorite creators on our platform is Tosh 2.0, right? I mean, he he he and his team do a really, really good job thinking about his his comedy shows and what he's producing and the theme of the content and making sure that his his overall brand and the content brand is aligned. Right. And then he drops products and it's engaging. It's integrated versus others that we have that just just don't put that much thought into it. Right.

10:22So very insightful.

10:24Ian Shepherd:Thanks. And for someone who's not familiar with the platform, like how do you get set up on it? And what did the economics look like? Okay, great question. So we're integrated in most of social social social media platforms. So let's let me use YouTube as an example. It could be Twitch, could be discord, it could be tick tock, it doesn't, you know, we're so we've done the hard work to integrate. So what happens in most scenarios, is when you get to like, for example, on YouTube, when you get to 500 subscribers, a little red flag pops up and it says, would you like to earn? And then you go in and there's globally, there's a few, there's a few companies in there, but we're, we're the, you know, we're sort of the predominant one when it comes to what we call one P somebody who wants to create their own brand.

11:06So if you want to create your own brand, you come in, basically all of the data you already have in YouTube just connects you, an accounts launched. And then we drop you, we drop you into this onboarding cycle where we gather information from you, a little bit of information from you, and then we help you launch your first product, right? We give you that experience of launching your first product. Then this is the biggest sort of tell moment for us is if the creator is really serious, then they will follow the next step, which means they go back to YouTube and they integrate the store into their YouTube product shelf, right?

11:44Because we just blast them with data. If you integrate your store, you're going to get like seven X more revenue because the store rides along with the content, right? So it's super simple within, you know, somewhere between three to five minutes, you can have your first product up and running and selling on the platforms. We do that. We do that with the creator, you know, the social commerce platform, social media platforms. We do it with a design software platforms like, so Adobe Express and Pixar, which are two of the, you know, two of the three leading global design software platforms. You design something and there's an option to an add-on.

12:17You just hit click and it creates a selling experience, right? So it's real simple to start the selling process. And then the way it works basically for a creator's revenue perspective is we give you three options. You can sell a digital product. So you can launch a course, a promotion, a how-to video, a podcast, whatever you want. You can put it in there and build a store of digital products. But in that situation, you have a lot of the platforms won't let you drop that into like you can't drop and sell a digital product in in YouTube. You can't drop and sell digital product and only fans. So but you can start and sell digital products and then you basically you put whatever margin you want on it.

12:58Right. We get a base fee and you put whatever margin you want. So it's very, very profitable for creators to do that and have a integrated selling selling experience. Then there are what we call on demand products. which we have a huge catalog of. And what we've done is we've gone around the world and we've integrated with suppliers and manufacturing facilities. So we give you this big catalog of all these different products you can do from apparel to home decor, to jewelry, to you name it. There's lots of different things you can sell. And we have design software built into it. And we also have Adobe Express Gen AI built into it.

13:34And so you go in, but the foundation of that, how it works is we give you a wholesale price and then our merchandising team that sits there and looks at all the online business daily, we'll give you a suggested retail price. And our suggested retail price typically gives the creator about 27 % gross margin. So we're suggesting to you like, hey, if you sell it at this price, which is very competitive online, you're going to make really good margin. Sometimes they may market up more. Sometimes they may do limited edition or limited drop, whatever. But they have control over that above our price.

14:07So anytime you sell something, you can collect your margin. The third thing we do is custom products. And so we have integrations with over 50 ,000 custom manufacturers. And that is where you come in and you say, hey, you know what? I'm thinking about launching my own wine line or my own coffee line or whatever. And you fill out a form. We get a bit of information from you. And then we basically will then come back and give you some product options. And that there's a lot of various, there's a lot of variables there. It can be something where, hey, I want to launch my own jewelry line. And we have manufacturers that can do a quantity of one.

14:44And so there's no upfront cost. But there may be something else where I want to do, you know, a stuffy or one of these new labooboos, whatever, whatever you want, you know, and those may have some minimum inventory requirement or something like that. So there's, there's different levels there. But that that's a bit more manual, because we're trying to discover like really what the creator wants to sell. But the nice thing is we have an integrations under the hood so that they don't have to worry about the manufacturing, the, the fulfillment, we do all that for them, they just have to, they just have to kind of help us figure out what product they want.

15:16But in all, on all scenarios, they get a rev share on the products being sold.

15:20Ian Shepherd:I have to say, as someone who was working with creators about 10 years ago, selling products, setting up Shopify stores, it's phenomenal how much easier it is now and how you've kind of made it a seamless frictionless process. What do you think about things like pre-sales or limited edition drops and adding that scarcity? Yeah, it's it's so this may be controversial, because I know there's some success pockets out there like with plushies where you see some success out there. But I think it's basically a condition that needs to it's a condition of the industry that the financial institutions still don't recognize the value of these creators and financing is not available, right?

16:04What fan wants to wait four months to receive their product? I mean, we have a customer support center. Trust me, the number one call is, where's my stuffy, because it takes three months to get it. So I don't think there's any creator out there that wants to do a presale, wants to do something like that. They're forced to do it because they don't have access to capital. And so the biggest problem to solve right now in the overall creator economy is doing the heavy work to help them get access to capital so that they can grow their business, right? There's tons of data out there, AdSense data, traffic, all the social data that you can find.

16:44There's so many different data points that are there that we collect. So I spend a lot of my personal time working with financial companies, thinking about how to bring credit and financing services to them because I do really think that the better we do that, the less you'll see these like pre-sales happen, right? There is an element of like, you know, there's still an element like, oh, I can't wait to get it. But look, it's getting tougher, right? With tariffs and stuff right now, I mean, it could take you three or four months to get a product out of China. So it's just, to me, it's there because it's fulfilling a void that financing hasn't been available.

17:23But I think it's getting better and better right now. So got it, got it.

17:28Ian Shepherd:And you operate so many different stores, you've mentioned the importance to continually promote, which I agree, like, are there any other sort of best practices or things that you see that really lead to a very successful campaign for a creator? Yeah, so in most of the platforms, and some of them don't let you do this. But most of the platforms, they let you tag if you're wearing or promoting or demonstrating the product in any way, shape or form, they let you tag it in the video. So you can actually activate live shopping, live streaming in most of the platforms today. It's not that hard. The people who do who are having a lot of success realize that, look, YouTube is being viewed at home and on a TV as much as it's being viewed on a mobile device, right?

18:10And if you if you watch it at home, the people who are tagging our stores, little icons are popping up during during the streaming of would you like to buy this and you can buy it from your remote control at home on the TV, right? It's putting your product in front of the audiences where they're consuming content, right? So that's one of the things that we see that's really rapidly evolving, but it's so simple to do. It's just, I think that the creators need a bit more education on how to do it, you know, or just the availability of it, but most platforms already allow it, right? So the other thing is that TikTok shop has created a pretty big change, right?

18:45This idea of long-form selling events, I think before TikTok Shop came out, there was a pretty strong feeling that promoting my product wasn't really authentic. It felt too salesy, right? And then TikTok Shop came out, and if you go by any of the studios that you see out there that are TikTok studios, it is very salesy. And what is done under the hood, though, a little bit is that, hey, maybe I don't have to be as salesy, but I can promote a bit more and find a happy medium. And just that extra little bit of promotion doesn't feel quite as salesy as TikTok shop, you know, live selling feels. But it does get that extra attention you need to get conversion, right?

19:27So that's pretty interesting, you know, to see it. But so you can feel it, right? You can you can see the opening up of, hey, if I'm going to monetize, I've got to do a little bit more promoting. I got to I've got to focus on my brand. I've got to talk about my product. I can't just drop it and expect people to buy it. Right. So, yeah.

19:44Ian Shepherd:Yeah. Makes absolute sense. And you touched on AI at the start. Can you expand on that a little bit more, whether it's with the design or whether it's sort of automations that you're using? How are you integrating AI across the piece? Yeah. So, so I have a very strong feeling about this and I have a very, we're very focused at Amaze on helping. So helping the seller do better. So helping. So the creator is the seller, right? And so if you, I'm going to, I'm going to compare Amaze to Etsy. So Etsy has done an amazing job creating this ecosystem of people who want to buy unique products, right? Makers, crafters, creators, artists.

20:24And there's a huge fan base of people who go in and look at it. The problem with Etsy, though, is that the sellers are not put first. So you start selling something at Etsy, you start having some success, the algorithms, all of a sudden there's 100 lookalikes, right? And so they have massively commoditized creativity. It really bothers me, right? In our world, if you think about everything we've done from studio to the Spring by Amaze to the Teespring marketplace, everything that we've done, right? We're using AI to look at the fan base, look at the fan data, and try to create lookalike audiences of buyers and then suggest that to the creator.

21:03So, you know, the luxury of where we are today is we've got over 2 billion unique visitors have come into our stores. We've got, we just hit 200 million verified fans coming in, right? So we have all this data. So what we're using AI for and what we're building is like, hey, I'm a creator. I come on our platform. I have some success. We look at your social profiles. We understand who you are, who your audiences are. And then once we see you start to have a little bit of success and you show some willingness to participate, right? Like you've got to promote, you've got to do some work. then we can come to you and say, hey, would you like to have access to lookalike audiences, right?