Interviews
The Structured Playbook for Ramping Up Digital Marketing
How to Build a Customer Feedback Engine with Enquire CEO Matt Bahr
The Ebbs and Flows of Scaling a Startup with Loop CEO Jonathan Poma
The Case for DTC Customization with Prose Co-Founder Paul Michaux
How to Leverage Sustainability to Drive Revenue Growth
How to Scale a DTC Growth Agency with Common Thread’s Taylor Holiday
Building Web3-Enabled Commerce Engines with Novel CEO Roger Beaman
The Future of Unified Commerce with Violet CEO Brandon Schulz
Unlocking Brand Design & Development with Doris Dev’s Justin Seidenfeld
Why Shogun Built a "Head" for "Headless" with Co-Founder Nick Raushenbush
Leveraging Reviews as a Growth Engine with Junip CEO Stuart Arsenault
Tactical Lessons from Scaling HelloFresh with CEO Dominik Richter
The Next-Gen Operating System for CPG with Cresicor CEO Alex Whatley
The Taika Playbook: Designing Custom R&D Engines
Influencer Marketing & Gen-Z Community with TBH CEO Elena Guberman
MuteSix Field Guide: How to Unlock Your Brand’s Optimal Ad Strategy
Cutting Acquisition Costs and Democratizing Data with Disco's Conner Sherline
Headless Upgrades and Category Dominance with Builder’s Steve Sewell
How to Build a Luxury DTC Brand with Last Crumb CEO Matt Jung
GTM Tools and Driving Reliable Revenue with ShipBob’s Casey Armstrong
Leveraging Automation and Socializing Stacks with Alloy CEO Sara Du
Loyalty Trends and DTC Referral Flywheels with Smile CEO Mike Rossi
Angel Investing, Growth Tactics, and eComm Stacks with James Beshara
Networking Flywheels and Flexible Financing with Settle CEO Alek Koenig
Designing Zero to One Growth Funnels with Julian Shapiro
Jeff Chang on Growth Funnels, Acquisition Playbooks, and Rapid Testing
Sahil Bloom on Content Strategy, Brand Voice, and Audience Growth
Data Paralysis and DTC Growth Levers with Source Medium’s Feifan Wang
How it works (for brands)
Automatically find winning ads from top brands
Stop coming up with ads from scratch or going through ad libraries by hand.
Automatically find winning ads across the internet with filters like time running (2+ weeks), like to comment ratio (10:1+), revenue ($100M+), platform (Shopify), & more.
Replaces AdSpy & Foreplay.
Copy winning ads with AI
Picking the right creative (from your library of 10,000 files) to show during your (1 minute) script is an extremely tedious puzzle game.
Instead, swipe right or left on ready-to-run ads generated by AI (based off winning ads we automatically find for you).
Uses AI to layer videos from your Creative Library, do captions, & generate voiceovers (powered by OpenAI Voice Engine which we have exclusive access to).
Optimize winning ads with AI
No more waiting weeks for reshoots (and not being able to properly iterate).
Take 1 perfect source video and instantly turn it into 20 videos with AI.
A/B test hook, story, & call-to-action to find the best messaging and improve ad performance.
What they're saying
Maneet Khaira
Ron Shah
Tim Chen
Maneet Khaira
Ron Shah
Maneet Khaira
Products
Get ready-to-run ads (uses AI to A/B test variants, layer videos from your Creative Library, do captions, & generate voiceovers).
(replaces AdSpy, Foreplay)
Detect winning ads, convert them to templates with AI, & use said template to get ready-to-run ads in Admaker.
(replaces Google Drive, Frame, Air, Recharm)
Store, tag, create, & split videos with AI.
(replaces Billo)
Get videos (AI or real) for your Creative Library.
(replaces Motion)
See which ads are winning & get “suggested”, ready-to-run ads in Admaker.
Story
Kennan Davison
Founders Fund
Ron Shah
Roman Khan
Founders Fund
Ron Shah
Kennan Davison
Yunyu Lin
Kevin Jin
Kennan Davison
Yunyu Lin
Why us
Track record of things that can't be faked
Icon is the best team helping brands create winning ads with AI.
Our CEO/Founder (who is writing this, sorry for writing in 3rd person) brings experience from Skio, Pinterest, Hulu, Wieden+Kennedy (ad agency), League of Legends (Top 200 North America, 100M+ players globally), & Y Combinator S20 (solo founder).
At Skio (subscription management software for brands on Shopify), he was CEO/Founder of the company from 2021 to 2024 helping grow revenue from $0 to $10M+ ARR in 3 years (w/ 90% margins) and a team of 50 (on $8.4M raised). Skio is profitable and still growing >100% YoY.
Our tech investors include Peter Thiel's Founders Fund, Kevin Hartz (A*, Eventbrite), Max Altman (Saga), Alex Botez (Chess), as well as founders & executives of OpenAI, Ramp, Flexport, Pika, Karat, & Cognition.
Our D2C investors include Ron Shah & Ash Melvani (Obvi), Roman Khan, Nick Shackelford, Jimmy Kim (Sendlane), Kevin Lee (Immi), Justin Mares (Kettle & Fire), Steph Liu (Levitate), Sara Du (Alloy), Jason Wong, as well as founders of Eight Sleep, Yotpo, Siena AI, Replo, Novel, Parker, GR0, DCL Logistics, Aftersell, Platter, Openborder, Prescient AI, Daasity, & more.
Our team has also worked with 1000+ brands like Liquid I.V., Milk Bar, Polaroid, Barstool, Unilever, Bulletproof, 100 Thieves, Vega, KOS, KITSCH, True Botanicals, mindbodygreen, Transparent Labs, GHOST, Wild One, OpenStore, The Nue Co., Immi, DRMTLGY, Boba Tea Protein, KraveBeauty, Glamnetic, Doe Lashes, Magic Mind, Remedy Organics, & Siete Foods.
Focused on helping brands create winning ads
Icon is focused on helping brands create winning ads vs. also juggling the underlying AI tech.
We believe our approach is fundamentally better because we're free to choose the best technology partner for a specific job.
To illustrate this, maybe one AI-video partner specializes in face closeups while another partner specializes in body movements (where face doesn't matter as much).
If we built all underlying technology in-house, it would create a fundamental conflict of interest where we can't offer a competitor's tool (that might be better) without losing revenue.