marketing has a discovery problem
thousands of companies. many categories. scattered everywhere
so we started mapping it
1,500+ companies later, the landscape is taking shape. and we’re nowhere near done
explore the map or list your company👇
https://t.co/RrwylnPgvc
Icon raised $30M to make UGC ads end-to-end
creator sourcing, scripts, filming, editing, finished ads
creator platform? agency? adtech?
increasingly, the answer is all three.
3 months ago, I sold my 1st company, Skio, for $105M cash.
Now my 2nd company, Icon, just raised $30M to launch something the world has never seen.
For $1000, we make 6 human creator ads (no AI, 100% real).
We find creators, ship products, write scripts, & edit videos.
It's risk-free:
- Full refund if you don't love your ads.
- You don't pay until you review 6 scripts.
- Unlimited human revisions.
Today, Icon introduces the world's first Agency.
We're not building a normal agency:
- We bought a $12M domain.
- We're backed by Founders Fund and OpenAI + Google DeepMind leaders.
It’s impossible to hire a creative team like ours for even $30K/mo:
- Creative Directors who've worked with $100M brands (IM8, Obvi, Ridge). They update our format library daily based on winning ads (street interviews, skits, & 20+ more).
- 12+ scriptwriters with $80M in Meta adspend.
- 200+ in-house editors who've edited 100K ads.
One more thing...
We're giving away our internal Google Drive with 1000 winning ads that have driven $100M+ in revenue.
You can make $100K copying these ads if you know what you're doing.
Want the Google Drive?
1. Retweet this post.
2. Comment "icon".
3. DM me this post’s link & I'll DM you back with the Google Drive.
[Bonus] Get 3 free human creator ads if you do the above and we end up working together.
minecraft just launched its first affiliate program with @impactdotcom
kinda wild that one of the world’s biggest games is only now entering affiliate
another reminder that affiliate isn’t an old channel. new categories of companies are still discovering it
search was built for humans
@KeenableAI just came out of stealth with $26M to build search infrastructure for AI agents, indexing 100B+ documents
the next discovery layer might not be designed for us to browse
it might be designed for agents to query
the creator economy is moving way beyond sponsored posts
Vogue reports brands are already bringing creators into strategy + product development
the interesting part? creators aren’t just media anymore, they’re becoming partners
discovery has a popularity problem
@Patreon is changing recommendations to understand individual posts, partly because its old system favored bigger creators
good discovery shouldn’t just show you who’s already big, it should help you find who’s relevant
@trygravityai raised $30.5M to build ad infrastructure for AI assistants
but the interesting part? they are already testing ads that humans never see, designed for AI shopping agents instead
might need a few new lines on the marketing ecosystem map
15 agencies just became founding partners of Moloco
the interesting part isn’t the list
it’s the relationships
knowing a company exists tells you what they do
knowing who they work with tells you where they actually sit in the ecosystem