Read Time: 1 min 30 secs

Hey — Ryan To here.

In today’s edition we’ll be covering:

• Why brands are getting outplayed by creator founders

• The audience-first business model flipping everything upside down

• Your 4-step creator marketing guide to get started

Your ‘competitive edge’ is not real.

Your latest feature? Copied in a few seconds with AI.

Your product? Rebranded and sold on a new site in a couple weeks.

Your top performing ads? Remade in a couple of days.

I’ve personally seen it happen with many founders I know.

The moment they start to gain traction their quote/unquote ‘brand’ gets stolen.

‘Brand’ is going extinct.

You know the one thing that can't be stolen? An owned audience.

That's exactly why creator founders are winning.

They own digital real estate that competitors can never steal.

The Creator Revolution

The way that businesses are being built in the next generation has flipped.

Build an audience first → Then build a product

It’s genius.

You have guaranteed customers at your doorstep from day one.

Creators have started to validate this new blueprint again and again.

Building 6-7 figure brands off of organic content alone:

@marcusmilione with Minted New York, an apparel brand.

@brandinowang with Blanked Studios, a home goods brand.

@heysirio with Enhancor AI, an AI SaaS tool.

And the best part is that brands simply can’t keep up.

Slow approval processes, out-of-date social teams, and the fear of being too ‘bold’.

This is where creator marketing comes in.

Quickly find the latest trend and film it in a couple minutes with your iPhone.

Volume and Speed are the two most important skillsets that smaller brands can use to beat out their legacy competitors.

Over 500 million pieces of content are posted everyday on the internet, the more at bats you have the higher chance you’ll strike.

So here’s some tactical tips to hit the ground running…

4-Step Creator Marketing Playbook ✶

Every brand—whether B2C SaaS or consumer CPG—needs to evolve into a creator-first organization. Here's how:

1️⃣ Start with Value, Not Products: Ask yourself: What can we teach our audience that you’re uniquely positioned to share (that others can’t)?

2️⃣ Build Your Content Pillars: Identify 3-4 themes that align with both your expertise and your audience's interests.

3️⃣ Embrace Authenticity Over Polish: Viewers prefer to learn from someone 3 steps ahead of them, instead of 10. Positioning yourself in a way that still feels within reach is 10x more actionable to the viewer.

4️⃣ Build Your Own Universe: Introduce characters, recurring themes, and inside jokes that make your audience feel like they're part of an exclusive community.

Thanks for showing up this week ❤️

Ryan To

P.S. I made a video on this exact same topic, watch it here