The $100M+ Business That Turns Creator Content Into Cash Flow

In 2013, a girl named Ronnie from a Toronto suburb started posting. A selfie after every gym session. A flat-lay of every healthy meal. Six months later she had 100,000 followers. And two guys who'd known her since high school noticed something nobody else seemed to be paying attention to…people weren't just watching her. They were asking her what sports bra she wore. What blender she used. What protein powder got her through leg day. And when she answered, they bought it.

That was the moment Adam Rivietz and his best friend Bryan, decided there was a business hiding in plain sight. They worked with Ronnie and got her paid. They cold-emailed hundreds of brands asking if they'd pay "random people on Instagram" to talk about their products and at the time, every single one said yes.

And then it became, in Adam's own words, a total sh** show. Hundreds of email threads. Dropbox links flying everywhere. Spreadsheets nobody could keep straight. So they built software to fix the mess they'd created. That software is now #paid, and now has over 200,000 creators on one side, hundreds of the world's biggest brands on the other, and more than $100 million+ paid out to creators in the years since.

I sat down with Adam at Possible in Miami, and this is a conversation I want to rewind and listen to over and over again. If you'd rather hear it straight from him, the full episode is on YouTube and Spotify.

Air Texas was paying $2,000 a month for an answering service that couldn't close jobs.

Their first after-hours call with Podium’s AI Employee booked a $20,000 job.

Now no call goes unanswered after 5PM.

See how it works

Adam told me about something he does with every founder he's ever invested in or advised, borrowed from Tim Ferriss…dreamlining. Write down everything you actually want in your life, things like how many vacation homes? How many kids? How many months a year you want to spend traveling? Then put a real dollar figure next to every single item.

Most people expect that they need to be a billionaire to have their dream life. In reality, they land somewhere between five and fifteen million dollars. Not a billion, even close. A specific number that covers literally everything they want out of their entire life. Once you have that number, Adam says the question becomes simple…what's the vehicle that gets you there?

I asked Adam what creators get wrong most often. He went straight for something almost nobody talks about, ghosting.

Not just ghosting brands you've already agreed to work with, but ghosting anyone, even brands you decided you don't want to work with. Nobody likes sitting and wondering “am I getting this deal or not? Are they going to show up or not?” The faster they get a no the faster they can move on to the next yes.

Communication is the most important thing. Saying "This isn't for me right now" closes the loop, costs nothing, and keeps the door open. Silence closes it permanently.

This is the piece of advice I want every single person reading this to actually act on, because it's free and most creators never think to use it.

Adam's challenge to all of you… open a note on your phone right now and write down every brand decision you made today without anyone paying you for it. What hair product. What toothpaste. What car you drive. What phone carrier you've been with for a decade and never once considered switching. Every one of those choices is a story you've been living for free, and it's exactly the kind of authentic detail that makes a brand pitch land.

"I've been an AT&T customer for twenty-five years and never switched" is a more persuasive sentence to a marketing team than almost any rate card in the world, because it's true and it can't be faked. In an industry drowning in obviously paid, obviously hollow partnerships, that kind of detail is the entire differentiator.

Infiniti came to #paid wanting a thirty-second commercial, but didn't want to spend the typical million-plus it costs to shoot one. So Adam's team found creators who specialized in automotive content. The final video cost roughly seventy-five to a hundred thousand dollars, usage rights included.

It became Infiniti's best-performing YouTube video ever. So the brand came back wanting to use it everywhere. On the backs of airplane headrests, on thousands of movie theater screens before previews, and more. That single deal is the reason #paid built out an entire usage-rights pricing system, because there was suddenly a real, recurring need for creators to know what their own content was worth once a brand wanted to take it far beyond the original post.

The lesson underneath the story is if your content performs above baseline, that's not the end of the deal. That's the start of a much bigger one, if you know to ask.

A lot of creators hear "whitelisting" or "dark posting" and either get suspicious or just say yes without understanding what they're agreeing to.

When a brand whitelists your content, they're not boosting your post for your existing followers to see more of. They're taking your content and running it as a paid ad to a completely different audience with full control over targeting that an organic post never gives them. And your follower count has almost nothing to do with what that's worth, because they're not paying for your audience anymore. They're paying for the asset you created.

Adam's advice before agreeing to anything: ask. How much are you planning to spend behind this? What are you trying to achieve? Impressions, clicks, conversions? Once you know that, you can ask for a percentage of spend, or a flat fee scaled to it, instead of guessing in the dark. Pricing in this corner of the industry is, in his words, the Wild West, and the only way to stop getting underpaid in the Wild West is to ask more questions than the other person expects.

Adam told me about a brand trip that genuinely sounded unreal! Last October, Virgin Voyages asked Adam's team if they could get a thousand creators on one ship. They did it. A thousand creators sailed out of Miami, stopped in Bimini, and came back three days later having posted over 17,000 pieces of content. The internet even nicknamed it "boatchella."

Adam said the whole point was about owning the narrative entirely, for one specific window of time, instead of competing for attention against everything else happening online that week. Sometimes the goal isn't to find the perfect ten creators. It's to make sure nobody scrolling that week could avoid hearing about you even if they tried. They’re looking to do it again next year, so keep an eye out for that incredible opportunity!

"I've been offered a whitelisted deal. The brand wants to run ads from my account for 90 days. They're offering $800 and I have 45,000 followers. Is that fair? How do I ask for what I deserve?"

Adam said your follower count is almost irrelevant, what matters is what they're actually buying. Is this boosting, where they're just pushing a button on your existing post with no real targeting? Or true whitelisting, where they're building a custom ad unit and putting real money behind it to reach people who've never seen your account?

Before agreeing to anything, ask directly: how much are you planning to spend running this? What's it targeting? If the honest answer is tens of thousands of dollars or more, $800 for 90 days of access is not in the same universe as fair, and now you have the exact leverage you need to say so.

Go follow Adam and the #paid team! This conversation had so many good tips and advice for creators that I couldn’t write them all here! Go watch the full episode on YouTube and Spotify, you won’t regret it!

Welcome to Creator Etiquette™. I am so glad you are here.

Xo, Gigi Robinson
Founder, Hosts of Influence® | Creator, Educator, Speaker, Author, Dog Mom

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