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)
Partner with the right creators faster
Take the guesswork out of choosing which creators to partner with.
Match with the best creators for your brand using key signals (e.g. follower count, engagement rate, audience demographics matching target customers).
You can also bring your own creators (BYOC).
Ads are whitelisted so that Meta's algorithm shows creator ads to their audiences (seeing a creator you follow recommend a product is more compelling versus someone random).
Whitelisted ads are the "sponsored" posts you see from creators in your Instagram feed. Also known as darkposts, they do not show up on a creator's profile.
Turn 1 video into 20 videos with AI
No more waiting weeks for creators to make videos.
Take 1 perfect source video from a creator and instantly turn it into many videos.
All videos are approved (or rejected) by creators.
AI-generated audio is powered by OpenAI Voice Engine (which we have exclusive access to).
[Coming soon] AI-generated B-roll. Type text ("Bloom Nutrition's Greens being scooped into tall glass") and get video back. For now, upload existing B-roll to have it automatically woven into videos.
Find winning ads by A/B testing messaging
Being bottlenecked by content creation is a thing of the past.
With instantly generated videos, you can A/B test your hook, story, & call-to-action to find the best messaging and improve ad performance.
What they're saying
Maneet Khaira
Ron Shah
Tim Chen
Alexandra Botez
Fred Liu
Reilly Opelka
Maneet Khaira
Ron Shah
Alexandra Botez
Fred Liu
Maneet Khaira
Alexandra Botez
Us vs. them
Other options
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 influencer 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), & Y Combinator.
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, Eric Wei & Will Kim (Karat), Alex Botez (Chess), Kevin Hartz (A*, Eventbrite), Max Altman (Saga), Reilly Opelka (Tennis), as well as founders & executives of OpenAI, Ramp, Flexport, Pika, & Cognition (Devin).
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 creators & brands partner with AI
Icon is focused on helping creators & brands partner with AI 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.
Another weakness of building underlying tech is one will inherently make lots of money from fake AI actors. Icon's mission is helping human creators win so this would be a conflict of interest for us.
Focused on helping human creators win with AI
Icon's mission is helping human creators win with AI and every decision we make is guided by this commitment.
The future of content will inevitably have fake AI actors. Despite this, we believe human creators augmented with AI will win (especially if we're helping).
An example of our mission guiding our decision-making is Icon not partaking in building underlying AI tech (which inevitably will make a lot of money from fake AI actors). This inherently helps us stay more focused on human creators.