how to make $50 - 100K a month as a creator with zero followers
straight from an e-com conference floor in new york:
the creator pod playbook is what everyone's running now. brands recruit mid-market creators with no following, put them in a discord, assign a creator coach who trains them weekly and tells them the best content angle of the day, and pay them on CPM or a percentage of ad spend behind their videos. gamify everything: top creator of the month wins a lamborghini. the platforms stopped rewarding follower counts, it's all content quality now, so complete nobodies can print. the dark part: if a brand doesn't have a "this mom made $50K last month" story to put on a pedestal, some of them just fake one.
as a creator your job is volume and adoption: 30 videos over 30 days minimum, some doing multiple a day. no editing required, the brand's team edits everything, you just do a selfie video talking about a product you actually use. they hand you the exact template. the content gets incrementally better through coaching, and once the money shows up the flywheel runs itself. tony's already porting zivi's creators into the system, and the 45+ mom demographic everyone thinks can't create is exactly who's converting.
the whole thing is the e-com playbook eating every industry. the head of growth at superhuman straight up said "we just do the e-com playbook." tom's take: e-com guys learned it from affiliates, and affiliate dropshippers are the bleeding edge marketers on earth, all kids. the group chat idea: roll up 20 brands, staff them with 20 eighteen-year-olds who live on tiktok, hand them capital, done. if you're in B2B, take literally any B2C tactic and you crush, because B2B is five years behind.
e-com intel from the same floor: free shipping is dying. more brands are charging $8-15 even above threshold, and paid refunds are quietly everywhere: seamless return flow, but the fine print deducts the label cost from your refund. nobody checks the bill after. michaela thought aritzia refunds were free. ten bucks a return, deducted from the order.
the instinct arc continued. calling feature is rolling out (imagine "hi, this is tom's AI agent, tom would like to book an electrician"), and agent-to-agent is live: your instinct talks to your friend's instinct to make plans. the fail of the week: a guy asked his instinct to plan a surprise party, it messaged his girlfriend's instinct to check her availability, and her agent told her about the party. its defense: "at least I didn't tell you what the surprise is."
the segment to clip: jacky's wife thinks AI is making everyone dumber, and the steelman went places. tom confessed he got lazy letting AI write zivi copy and the output was so bad he's gone quality over quantity. his blood test guy calls AI's lab analysis a fail, the physicist he golfed with won't touch it for MRI work. then he turned the gun: "jacky is a meat proxy. I ask him a question, he screenshots it into AI, and pastes the answer back. if AI told him to jump off a bridge he probably would." jacky's defense: peter pioneered meat proxying a year early, and the responses only get better from here. wait for fable 10.
where they landed is the actual insight: AI is pattern recognition, so humans win on taste, judgment, and creativity. tony's version is the keeper: one-shot prompts produce the same generic output everyone else gets, zero arbitrage. a painter sees brush strokes where you see a photo, and that depth is what builds the masterpiece. systems thinkers who understand the building blocks direct AI to outputs 10x better, which is why developer demand is going up, not down. critical thinking is cooked for everyone else, because when answers are frictionless, nobody thinks about the question.
NGMI with @itstonyyu and @tomwang24. episode 20, to the one guy who said we wouldn't make it.
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