GramWorthy
CEO & Co-Founder · 2017–2018
A micro-influencer marketing agency that was profitable within two months and built a talent book of over 100 models. I learned that distribution is the product.
What I Learned
- Profitability within two months meant the model was right. It also meant we'd found a ceiling -- the business scaled linearly with headcount.
- The hard part of talent management is not finding talent. It's managing expectations on both sides of a deal simultaneously.
- Micro-influencer marketing worked because the engagement was real. We were early to a shift that is now conventional wisdom.
GramWorthy started from a simple observation: brands were spending money on macro-influencers with massive followings and mediocre engagement, and ignoring a tier of smaller creators who had genuine relationships with their audiences. We thought that was a pricing inefficiency worth exploiting.
My co-founder and I built a talent book of Auckland-based models and lifestyle creators -- over 100 by the time we wound down -- and connected them with brands who wanted authentic content rather than polished advertising. The agency model was straightforward: we sourced the talent, structured the deals, handled the brief-to-delivery process.
Profitable within two months. That's the number I'm proud of. It meant the unit economics were right from the start -- we weren't burning cash to figure out whether there was a business here.
The ceiling was also real. Agency businesses scale with headcount, and we weren't interested in building a large operations team. There was a natural point where the question became "do we build the infrastructure to grow this into something bigger, or do we close it cleanly while it's working?" We chose the latter.
The thing I think about most from GramWorthy is the distribution insight. We were never really selling marketing campaigns. We were selling access to an audience that trusted the person delivering the message. That's a different product than what most marketing platforms were selling at the time, and understanding that distinction shaped how I thought about platform businesses for years after.