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My last startup, an influencer ad network called Jetfuel, felt like a treadmill. The business relied on short-term arbitrage that combined creators, their psychology, their followers and their demands, and our advertisers’ objectives.

Those things were generally at odds. That meant constant pressure to find new advertisers and new creators. It had the elements of an agency combined with the hit-drivenness of a mobile gaming studio. Looking back, it kinda sucked.

Creators wanted to make as much money as possible, with as little work as possible, and as little annoyance to their followers as possible. Advertisers wanted to spend as little as possible for the highest return on ad spend. Sometimes these aligned and the network exploded.

When Trump announced he might shut down TikTok, Byte, a Vine relaunch by the original co-founder, raised its CPI. The story was topical, so volume exploded. I think we drove about 400,000 installs of Byte in 24 hours. That was our largest single day, by a wide margin.

Catching lightning in a bottle like that was hard to do and hard to repeat. Arbitrage prints a great day, week, or month. It does not, by itself, produce long-term durable value.

The story we told ourselves

This was a problem with investors. They want repeatable, long-term durability. We tried to spin the tension into an opportunity. We convinced ourselves we could build a place where creators cared about their reputation and profile, and so would have a reason to come back. We spent a long time on that network. When it launched, there wasn’t much usage. Creators still came to make a quick buck.

We were working backwards from two beliefs. We’re a Silicon Valley startup, so we need long-term value. A network with hundreds of thousands of creators will have long-term value. Creators didn’t really seem to want a network to talk in.

What we should have done is take an honest look at where the long-term value in the ecosystem actually was, and build in that direction.

Own both sides

We were starting to. Tim, my co-founder, saw that the terminal value was not brokering deals. It was owning both sides of the marketplace. That meant vertically integrating: own the apps and products you sell, and own the creator pages. We built Refined Media and Takeoff Labs for those. It was early, and both were starting to work.

A preemptive acquisition by Liftoff cut that short. It worked out well for us and our investors. Once we were acquired, we weren’t really able to pursue those two channels, largely because Liftoff didn’t want to compete with its clients.

I can see now how long the journey would have been without the acquisition. I think we could have made something meaningful. The clipping mania of late would have been a good time to be in the brokering business. A vertically integrated creator economy company would be quite valuable right now.

Data labs

I wonder how this applies to the data labs at the moment. They are running a similar playbook, brokering content to a buyer that is very willing to pay. If I were running one, I’d treat the revenue as hits-driven. It’s less clear to me how to vertically integrate here.

Can you own the people and firms creating the data? The one-and-done nature of the content worries me. You can’t really integrate upstream unless you become a frontier lab. Maybe you try to become a synthetic data generation lab.

The cash flow makes me think founders should take some of the money off the table. Secondaries or dividends. It doesn’t really matter which.