Pod Insights How I Invest with David Weisburd E330: EuropeanKid: The $32B Future of Influencer Marketing About this episode What if influencer marketing isn’t about chasing mega-followers, but activating the creators who already love your brand?
In this episode, I sit down with Aris Yeager, Founder of Storytime, to explore how he built a platform connecting brands with nano and micro creators to run highly targeted campaigns at scale. A creator himself known online as European Kid, Aris leverages his own social experience to help businesses automate gifting, engage loyal audiences, and measure campaign effectiveness while focusing on authenticity over follower count.
Transcript Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.
0:00 Speaker 00 I charge thirty to fifty thousand dollars for a post, which I think is obscene. But taking that money and being like, how do we distribute this to like hundreds and thousands of smaller creators that love our brands? That's the shift that I'm betting on in the market.
0:14 David Weisburd? Beats by Dre, Skims by Kim Kardashian, that they started a new model that made them successful. What was that model?
0:20 Speaker 00 Even though these are like very celebrity oriented brands with like one face, is that they're actually activating so many different nano-micro creators.
0:31 David Weisburd? Somewhere around a decade ago, the business world started to take media seriously. You had Mr. Beast, you had George Clooney with his brands, you had The Rock. You're now taking this attention, the two billion people, and transferring it into a business. Tell me about what you're building.
0:51 Speaker 00 Obviously, those are great case studies of success stories. But I've seen, there's so many stories of like failed celebrity brands. But it's, yeah, like when you have distribution, it's everything in business. And for me, the most important thing was, what I learned was how to really do influencer marketing. And for me, I noticed that like I'm exceptionally good at it. So I wanted to also build in that space because like from that experience, I noticed that like, also my background is I've always been very entrepreneurial. And for me, like being able to innovate in this area was, I've always wanted to create startups. So for me, I was like compelled to do a startup next in that space. And that's kind of what pushed me to this next chapter.
1:35 David Weisburd? Just an elevator pitch. What is Storytime?
1:38 Speaker 00 It's a marketplace that allows creators to instantly connect with different businesses. I wouldn't say local businesses, but we work with, you know, even huge chains now. But it's supposed to be a very easy way to automate the gifting going on. So especially with like the micro giftings, like a cup of coffee, a workout class, you know, a nail salon studio. They can instantly put offers and like reach hyper local creators to come in and redeem offers next chance for posting content.
2:07 David Weisburd? You're not focused on a large influencers. You're focused on these micro influencers. Tell me about these micro influencers. Who are they and why are they such a lucrative part of the market?
2:16 Speaker 00 My philosophy with Storytime is that the future of influencer marketing is all nano-micro. Brands want to work with people that love their brands, right? If you can activate at scale, hundreds and thousands of small people, it's a lot more effective as one big creator. And right now, what you're looking at, these big brands like Casamigos, Kardashians, you know, they spend a lot of money on like one specific influencer. I don't think that's going to be the future of influencer marketing.
2:44 David Weisburd? Tell me about a specific influencer in a specific business on your platform? And how does Storytime help them?
2:50 Speaker 00 Imagine Jo and the Juice, right? They want to gift out a bunch of products. The most effective person that Jo and the Juice wants to target are hyper-local creators that are going to be able to go in and redeem an offer like, you know, in exchange for posting a very simple story. So we're going to be able to activate thousands of creators that have a very relevant reach to Jo and the Juice. But imagine not even Jo and the Juice, like Devolution, which is a coffee shop only in New York City. We're very focused on the data behind activating like specific, specific locations from the influencers that are going to help target the business.
3:27 David Weisburd? You have a fashion influencer. She might be 25 years old, has 10 to 50,000 followers. And Jo and the Juice wants to reach her audience and they give her a $25 gift to basically make a simple post. So she's getting a free gift for just a story, a brand that she probably wants to share anyways. And Jo and the Juice is getting access to her network and being able to distribute to her followers.
3:55 Speaker 00 It's almost like, like Jo and the Juice can instantly kind of use our platform to just reach thousands of creators locally to push certain campaigns that are like a lot more effective as running meta ads or any other type of like pushing, right? Cause it's, it's supposed to be organically done.
4:12 David Weisburd? This is a network effect business of sorts, kind of like Facebook, Uber, where you have a supply side and the demand side.
4:20 Speaker 00 Yeah.
4:20 David Weisburd? How are you able to get past the chicken egg problem that plagues every single network effect business?
4:28 Speaker 00 Having my experience as a creator just gives me so much more legitimacy to be going into this space. And I think like, because I saw it firsthand as an issue that I had. And for me, that was one of the most important parts of like, when I approached, when I approached the product with my co-founder, you know, very much like considering, okay, what is the issue that I'm facing? Because I know that this issue is being faced by all types of creators. And then really focusing on how do I leverage my network and the ability to connect? I'm, I think I'm very good at connecting with other amazing founders. And my biggest objective was getting feedback from all the different founders of big chains. Like, for instance, the founder of Sweetgreen, founder of Oakberry, um, the founder of Kaba. And understanding is the market, like, what's, what's the issue that they're having with activating creators?
5:13 Speaker 00 And how can I help?
5:15 David Weisburd? I've known you since you first started the company. And every month you're coming to me with a newer version, with a better improved version. That's downstream of this customer feedback, sitting down, talking to your customers, just incessantly improving your product.
5:27 Speaker 00 Constantly like, listening to what feedback, like feedback is from creators and from the, from the business side?
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6:59 David Weisburd? So interesting, because when I look at companies, I think about what is their unfair advantage? And network effect businesses are so hard to build. You're able to bridge that zero to one, because they look up to you. You have millions of followers, they might have 10,000 followers. You're basically what they want to be when they grow up. And because of that, you're able to outreach to them and kind of build this flywheel.
7:20 Speaker 00 Everything that's come from social media, which to me, to this day, is honestly still kind of quite mind boggling, has allowed me so much in business. And that's why I always implore people, like, start building a social following as soon as you can. Like, if you're comfortable taking, doing content, you should be doing content, because it will, it will help you regardless in what you're doing.
7:39 David Weisburd? Were you conscious of doing the first kind of videos? How did you overcome that fear?
7:43 Speaker 00 I've always loved acting. So for me, it's like come naturally to do like, you know, mimic like other people, make, do funny accents, like this was always like my personality growing up. So I never had an issue like being in front of camera. Honestly, I viewed it as fun. Like, I enjoy mocking my friends. I think we all do it, and I enjoy making videos about it. So for me, like, it came natural.
8:06 David Weisburd? Today, the business model is kind of intuitive. You charge the businesses to give them, influencers to give them access. Have you thought about this five, 10 years from now? What could Storytime be in the future?
8:17 Speaker 00 What Storytime is, it's like a new type of currency, right? The idea is that every day we can influence our friends. You know, you could tell your friend about a coffee shop that you went to. You can tell them about a movie that you went to that you loved and it will be more honest than ever. For me, it's about being able to connect very, just people that love brands to be able to be wanting to get rewarded about it. So Storytime is a currency for, it's, the idea is, it's not just like influencers. I don't like the idea of people thinking it's influencers with a hundred thousand followers. We're very much redefining by focusing on like, how real is this person? A lot of the best creators that are on Storytime, they're not influencers full time.
9:00 Speaker 00 They work here in finance jobs and the truth is, those are the most effective people. They might, the girl has three thousand followers, but if she goes out for lunch and she says, I go to Sweetgreen every day. Sweetgreen should be like, hey, we, we love that you go to Sweetgreen, you should be able to get rewarded for that. So the goal is to create it as a currency that can be implemented in so many different businesses, right? And the way that like from, again, from what workout you're doing in the morning, I, I see you at Othership.
9:27 David Weisburd? Yeah.
9:27 Speaker 00 You're, you're, you're a loyal follower, like you're a loyal customer of Othership.
9:32 David Weisburd? Yeah, same.
9:32 Speaker 00 You should be rewarded for wanting to talk about Othership on your, on your socials, right? Cause it comes natural and you want, you would want a free session in exchange. So that's the goal of Storytime.
9:41 David Weisburd? So you're really plugging into this authentic desire and authentic connection to the brand. I think that's something that's really missing in this market is you have, from one side, you have these advertisements, highly curated, highly produced, Super Bowl ads. On the other side, you have just influencers selling something that they have no connection with.
10:01 Speaker 00 Yeah.
10:01 David Weisburd? And here you found this niche where it's brands and companies and stores that influencers would naturally want to go to. Now they're just being compensated for it.
10:10 Speaker 00 The reality is like, once you reach a certain number of followers, like you're, it is harder to know that you're not a sellout. Because it's inevitable, you're gonna get crazy prices, suppose about things. People are getting tired of celebrities kind of pushing products. It feels less organic and authentic. And I think it's just a matter of time before like, there's a big shift in the market of, you know, again, instead of like charging, I charged thirty to fifty thousand dollars for a post, which I think is obscene. But taking that money that, and being like, how do we distribute this to like, hundreds and thousands of smaller creators that love our brands? That's what the, that's the shift that I'm, I'm betting on in the market.
10:50 David Weisburd? I interviewed our mutual friend Scott Vandenberg from Hot Start, and he has this fund that invests only in celebrity brands. And he did a deep dive into the space and he figured out that most celebrity brands actually fail. And the ones that succeed, there's one thing in common, they're authentic to the brand. So you've literally have had some celebrities that don't drink or have gone sober, selling vodka brands or tequila brands, and those invariably fail. The, the problem is that most people only remember the successes. It's availability heuristic. So you only remember the things that are big. You don't remember the ninety-nine percent that failed. So I think there's this now trend to create, I guess, fit between the celebrity and the brand, which is why I love Storytime so much.
11:33 David Weisburd? You are not only a consumer of the brand, but it's, it's core to who you are and what you do on your day to day basis.
11:41 Speaker 00 Absolutely.
11:42 David Weisburd? Last time we chatted, you were telling me about Beats by Dre, Skims by Kim Kardashian, that they started a new model that made me, them successful. What was that model?
11:52 Speaker 00 What they're honestly doing did a great job of, even though these are like very celebrity oriented brands with like one face, is that they're actually activating so many different macro, nano-micro creators. Like Rhodes was, I think they've, they spent so much money on gifting product to creators. So it's ironic, but they're actually, they did it at a very incredible level already. So I think, which proves it's, it's more than just having one prominent face of the brand. Like Beats for Dr. Dre, they sent out their Beats to, I think, every single athlete. Like every top tier athlete was wearing Beats. That was all intentional.
12:32 David Weisburd? So Beats by Dre, Skims by Kim Kardashian. That was the first test case of this nano-influencer. You're taking it to the next level and productizing it. What is story time disrupting? Who would have traditionally done this? Or is this a completely new activity?
12:49 Speaker 00 Right now, it's being done in the most manual, inefficient way. Like from agencies to, you know, either like the owner of a restaurant or trying to hire social media people to like help them with their brand. Because right now, like everyone, you go out, everyone's like flocking to understand how do we do influencer marketing? You have companies like Blackstone that created a TikTok. This is like unseen. Every single business is like, we need to consider influencer marketing. It's the truth. Because if you're not, you're not keeping up with the trends. So you have all these people trying to, you know, hire positions, work with agencies. And we're just here to help the connectivity by being able to create a campaign, leveraging some of the, some AI to be able to create a campaign that's going to be best suited for you.
13:34 Speaker 00 Or you, all you have to do is say, this is what we want to gift out. These are the people that care and we're going to help you do it in the most efficient way possible. Like, that's it.
13:43 David Weisburd? You mentioned Blackstone. Jonathan Gray is now running around doing running videos. Everyone's trying to get to social and doing influencer art. I think a lot of people have cognitive dissonance and they love to do more influencer marketing. They love to do more social, but they're also afraid of losing control.
13:59 Speaker 00 Yeah.
13:59 David Weisburd? With a Super Bowl, you have this highly-produced ad that they work on for a year. How should brands think about scaling in a way that's safe to their brand?
14:09 Speaker 00 It's a fine balance. And I think for instance, like, I mean, I loved Ram's activation in the Super Bowl. Like they, it was hilarious and it's bold, right? But I think that like.
14:23 Speaker 00 I think being bold is it's obviously we see it like in more like tech tech and crypto. You you'll see more come to be bold than traditional like finance oriented. And I completely understand why I'm pro controversial content because controversial. You know, obviously with like sprinkling controversial always does well. And that's that's how you can actually go viral on social media. You need to have, you need to be daring and when you're doing content. If you're going to just do basic content, I think it's kind of redundant. A lot of people are doing it. So I always push businesses be daring.
14:55 David Weisburd? People think about when they're on social media, they like and they share. They think that that's it's sort of like enjoying it. You have to really have very strong affinity. People do not give up their likes and shares for free. People really only share excellent content, content that takes risks, content that really is is took a lot of time, a lot of effort. People think that getting this like and this share is this easy task, but there's a very high hurdle for that.
15:22 Speaker 00 Exactly, exactly. Some of the companies have done it the best. They're obviously like Duolingo has an incredible like TikTok strategy where they were like. Have you ever seen Duolingo's video?
15:33 David Weisburd? Yeah, yeah.
15:34 Speaker 00 It's hilarious, like people love it and they and and they are not afraid to make fun of their themselves. And I think that's what's so great. Same with Ryanair. Ryanair is like a a low fare airlines company from Ireland that like you'd never imagined could build a social media presence, but they did.
15:52 David Weisburd? Mentioned tech companies, crypto companies are more daring. Sometimes I think about this as founder led versus non founder led.
15:59 Speaker 00 That's true.
16:00 David Weisburd? The founders are the ones that are willing to take risks. The founders are the ones that are willing to push things to to their max. When you're working with brands and story time, how much is founder led brands? How how much an advantage is that?
16:15 Speaker 00 Yeah, you're absolutely right. Like when when a company is going through more like corporate structure, like it's inevitable that it's it's harder to be daring because you have just all these different layers of like approvals they need to go by.
16:27 David Weisburd? Right before this interview, we were talking about the evolution of Storytime. You started out in the SMB sector where it's either easier to penetrate. Now you're going into larger brands.
16:37 Speaker 00 Being able to create campaigns with AI in the most efficient ways as possible for like being able to activate loyal customers. And we've been doing like an exceptional job with like some of these big chains, um, like Joe and the Juice and Oakberry. And obviously, our model is very scalable into different markets. So now we're going, we've been going into fitness, we've been going into retail. Every kind of brick and mortar store can kind of leverage our platform to be able to help with their gifting. Um, and yeah, we're just obviously really cutting out a lot of unnecessary inefficiency. Because if you look at a huge company, they have all these marketing people that are trying to manage manually all the gifting and connecting with creators and connecting with, and we're doing it all.
17:21 Speaker 00 I mean, we're, we're doing it completely autonomously. And we've like, we're doing over, you know, six hundred different people, six hundred different collaborations a day, minimum in New York City alone, of people being able to get connected seamlessly to different brands. To do that kind of scale required so much manual power and like, and I think that's the power of kind of what we're building.
17:46 David Weisburd? You're really the tip of the spear of AI in media, specifically in video. Tell me specifically how you use AI to produce high quality content with brands behind it.
17:58 Speaker 00 We've used AI in a lot of different areas. It's based off what the business is looking for. If they're, for instance, like if a business comes on our platform and says, we want to push very specific wellness oriented creators and they can basically kind of, we can just customize it based off what their specific needs are. Every customer is different, but the point is that this kind of just allows it to be more seamless. Um, but yeah.
18:22 David Weisburd? Malcolm Gladwell, now I think 20 years ago, wrote this book, The Tipping Point, which talks about how ideas spread. They start with these mega influencers, then these nano influencers, and then society. When you work with a brand that's trying to get a beachhead within a new market, how does that work? And what's the lifeline of some, a brand becoming influential in new markets?
18:41 Speaker 00 The analogy of influencer marketing is like crypto. You have a lot of very legitimate people in crypto and you have a lot of very illegitimate people like scammy. Crypto has a bad rep. Influencer marketing has a bad rep because a lot of influencers are charging more than they should be charging to businesses and there isn't like a good amount of transparency going on with who is a good creator or not. So with me and Philip, my co-founder, we, you know, coming from the background of influencer marketing, understanding how important it is to be vetting creators, understanding the breakdown of their audiences, which are so relevant, whether they should be qualifying for campaigns or not, as opposed to, oh my God, that creator has a million followers.
19:22 Speaker 00 They must be able to have a huge impact on that business. Absolutely not. There's no vetting process. It's futile. Like, so that's what we're all about. It's about analyzing every single data point of a creator.
19:35 David Weisburd? A brand, let's say it's a 10-store chain in New York City. What kind of budget are we talking about for somebody that wants to target this part of the market?
19:44 Speaker 00 Let's think about before story time. Imagine they want to activate people. That's like, so imagine like the thousands of different like either, you know, emails, messages that they have to send to creators to be like, hey, like, we're here in the city, like come talk about us. We want to work with you. Like it'd be so many hours of unnecessary. They can come to us and we can create a campaign in less than five minutes. That's going to be basically weighing every single little detail that's relevant to them on like how effective, like specific. Like we have so many different data points to like really kind of align what is the most optimal campaign for this brand and then just put it on autopilot.
20:27 Speaker 00 And or it's actively engaging a community of people that love their products, posting it about it in the most efficient ways possible, where they're just giving out their products as opposed to paying, you know, an agency thousands of dollars. I would say at around a price of $500 to $1,000 per month, right? Depending on how much.
20:47 David Weisburd? And then you get the data and then you could decide to scale.
20:49 Speaker 00 Yeah.
20:49 David Weisburd? Once it's proven out it's ROI.
20:51 Speaker 00 We are 10 times cheaper.
20:54 Speaker 00 Than any other influencer marketing solution that's out there right now.
20:58 David Weisburd? Storytime is your first company, founded it, you've scaled it now to a solid scale. What's been the thing that you most underestimated about being an entrepreneur?
21:11 Speaker 00 The importance of just having a team that's like aligned on, you know, just being able to outsource like specific tasks and being able to really leverage like, for instance, like my time is best spent doing like content, doing specific meetings to engage like specific founders of big chains as opposed to like, you know, trying to rub my head around like technical and kind of being able to just delegate all the like, forming a team that is able to like work on all the different.
21:44 David Weisburd? Is that hard to remove yourself from parts of the business and focus on the high leverage?
21:50 Speaker 00 Honestly, no. There was a time where, I hate to say it, but I was editing a video for Storytime. And I would spend so many hours editing it. And I'm like, this is just not effective. And so everything that you do, you have to be like, why am I the, why is this the best use of my time?
22:06 David Weisburd? It's a paradox because on one hand, when you find somebody that could do the tasks better than you, it's at one time very freeing because wow, now I don't have to spend all my time on this. It's also very humbling. It's, what do I do?
22:18 Speaker 00 Exactly.
22:18 David Weisburd? If I'm not the one that does this, how do I do that? And then you have to reassess where's the high, what could I, Eris, AKA European Kid, how do I leverage my time in order to to grow the business versus how do I edit this video? Or how do I do this very specific task?
22:32 Speaker 00 Exactly.
22:34 David Weisburd? If you go back three years ago, when you were just starting European Kid, before people knew who you were, what is one piece of advice you'd give a younger Eris? That would have either helped accelerate Storytime and your social media career? Or helped you avoid costly mistakes?
22:52 Speaker 00 Honestly, just.
22:55 Speaker 00 Always be daring. Like, I think, like, the only reason that I started European Kid was purely because of like a random, you know, moment where I'm like, because of a daringness, I was like, why not? Why not just try things? So with that, like, being, like, when, when I see there's momentum picking up, I've been, been like so like pushing, pushing nonstop and trying things. I think that's like the most important thing, like.
23:22 David Weisburd? How long did it take before you had your first viral hit?
23:25 Speaker 00 I remember starting around COVID, where I was like playing around with even having a TikTok account. And then after, yeah, and then I would say around a year in, uh, I did the kind of the Louis video and that obviously propelled, like, that started the character.
23:43 David Weisburd? A lot of people ask about motivation when somebody's made it. It's actually pretty easy probably now to make videos, you know, millions of people watch it and take motivation. But the hardest thing is the zero to one before anyone's watching. Was that a hard part for you? Did you have a strategy to make it easier?
24:00 Speaker 00 No strategy, very, um, just kind of, you know, just posting, trying to make it feel more like something that's fun and like not making it feel like a chore where it's like, I need to post, I need to post. And I feel like a lot of the times now people are obsessively trying to post and because, and I think that you, you have to be creative. I, I, I didn't know a, a, a, a rich French kid would be the one that takes off, right? I just was experimenting with different angles. That's, that's why experimentation is everything. Don't assume that you know it's going to go viral because you never know until you just try everything.
24:36 David Weisburd? And sometimes even when it's working, you don't quite know. You, you don't really know why it works. You have some theories and some factors, but you don't know exactly why it works.
24:44 Speaker 00 Exactly.
24:45 David Weisburd? Well, I love what you're doing. I'm proud to be an advisor to the company. It's only the second company I've advised in six years. The first one was Bitwise, which was it worked out quite well. What, what could I do for you and what would you like from, from our network?
25:00 Speaker 00 Just being able to get constant advice is always useful to navigate through all the different kind of, um, from, from raising capital to, you know, building a team. Obviously you have a lot of, you have, I have a great network, but you have a great network. So it's
25:15 David Weisburd? Our, our networks are very different.
25:16 Speaker 00 I think, I think it's
25:17 David Weisburd? I have very few influencers and you have very few institutional investors.
25:22 Speaker 00 No, exactly. And I think that's where like combining that, like that's the ultimate success. It's, it's actually, it's all, it's all a network play. Like I believe it, obviously you need to work hard, but the second thing is like really taking, like leveraging the network around you to get things done because that's how you're going to be.
25:38 David Weisburd? About finding the right players on your team to fill the different holes where you might not have your strength.
25:44 David Weisburd? If you found this conversation valuable, please click follow how I invest so that you don't miss the next episode with the world's top investors.
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