This guy built a $100M creator marketplace with 4 college friends in under 3 years I sat with him for nearly two hours as he explained how they did it, and we're sharing the full, raw conversation here on X @ManilowOliver and 4 college friends started SideShift as a local job board that made about $500 No customers, no real users, no product-market fit, just desks in a friend’s apartment kitchen Today, they’re at 8 figures in ARR, their app hit the top 10 in the App Store, and Sideshift is home for more than 1M creators Here’s the core of what he taught me: > influencers rent you their audience. UGC creators post from new accounts, so the same budget buys ~100x the volume > the creator manager matters more than the creators themselves. Similar creators have been seen to perform 10x apart, and the only change was the manager > organic content finds the winners, paid ads scale them. When a video hits ~8% engagement, boost it with Spark Ads or Meta partnership ads We go deep on all of it in this conversation If you run a consumer app, these are the most useful 83 minutes you’ll spend this year