In this interview from theCUBE + NYSE Wired: Capital Series, Aris Yeager, founder of Storytime, joins David Weisburd, host of the "How I Invest" Podcast, to discuss the market shift from high-priced celebrity mega-posts to authentic, hyper-local nano and micro creator networks. Yeager, who built a multi-million follower social media presence as "European Kid," draws on firsthand creator experience to explain why brands get diminishing returns from big-name influencer deals. He outlines Storytime's model: a marketplace connecting businesses — from independent coffee shops to national chains — with hyper-local micro and nano creators who receive gifted products in exchange for organic posts, automating what agencies and manual outreach currently handle at enormous cost and inefficiency.
Key themes include the case studies of Beats by Dre and Skims by Kim Kardashian, which Yeager highlights as early proof that even celebrity-fronted brands succeed by activating thousands of nano creators rather than depending on a single face. He addresses the two-sided marketplace challenge directly, explaining how his creator credibility and early conversations with the founders of Sweetgreen, CAVA and OAKBERRY helped Storytime establish traction on both sides of the platform. The discussion also covers AI's role in campaign creation, enabling Storytime to facilitate over 600 brand-creator collaborations per day in New York City alone — at a fraction of traditional agency costs. From lessons in delegation and founder-led content strategy to the entrepreneurial principle of constant experimentation, Yeager makes the case that the future of brand marketing belongs to the authentic, the local, and the bold.
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How I Invest Podcast with Aris Yeager
Exploring Tokenization in the Modern Finance Economy with Kendrick Nguyen
Kendrick Nguyen, founder and Co-Chief Executive Officer of Republic, joins David Weisburd on the "How I Invest Podcast" in collaboration with theCUBE and New York Stock Exchange Wired: Capital Series. Republic facilitates over $2.6 billion in transactions, and Nguyen shares insights on tokenization in private markets, setting the stage for a transformative discussion on the evolving landscape of finance.
In this episode, Nguyen brings their expertise as a pioneer in financial democratization, exploring tokenization as revolutionary infrastructure similar to how the internet transforms commerce. Hosts from theCUBE Research delve into key concepts such as fractionalization, automation and cross-border transactions, discussing how these elements aim to broaden access and improve efficiency in investing and trading.
Key takeaways include Nguyen's vision of capital markets evolution, emphasizing the reduction of technical and legal barriers to empower retail investors. They highlight that by 2025, the financial landscape will undergo significant growth. Nguyen highlights Republic's pioneering role in tokenizing private market assets, collaborating with partners such as Robinhood to implement innovative solutions for retail access to high-demand investments.
In this interview from theCUBE + NYSE Wired: Capital Series, Aris Yeager, founder of Storytime, joins David Weisburd, host of the "How I Invest" Podcast, to discuss the market shift from high-priced celebrity mega-posts to authentic, hyper-local nano and micro creator networks. Yeager, who built a multi-million follower social media presence as "European Kid," draws on firsthand creator experience to explain why brands get diminishing returns from big-name influencer deals. He outlines Storytime's model: a marketplace connecting businesses — from independent ...Read more
exploreKeep Exploring
What is Storytime?add
What is Storytime and how does it work to reward everyday people (rather than just big influencers) for sharing brand recommendations?add
What model did Beats by Dre and Skims use that made them successful?add
How does the company use AI to create scalable marketing campaigns and automate gifting and creator collaborations for brick-and-mortar brands?add
What budget is required for a brand (for example, a 10-store chain in New York City) to target that market using your influencer-marketing/campaign service?add
>> I charge $30,000 to $50,000 for a post, which I think is obscene. But taking that money and being like, how do we distribute this to hundreds and thousands of smaller creators that love our brands? That's the shift that I'm betting on in the market.
David Weisburd
>> Beats by Dre, Skims by Kim Kardashian, that they started a new model that made them successful. What was that model?
Aris Yeager
>> Even though these are very celebrity oriented brands with one face, is that they're actually activating so many different nano micro creators.
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, we had The Rock. You're now taking this attention to two billion people and transferring it into a business. Tell me about what you're building.
Aris Yeager
>> Obviously, those are great case studies of success stories, but I've seen there's so many stories of failed celebrity brands. But 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 I'm exceptionally good at it. So I wanted to also build in that space because from that experience, I noticed that ... Also, my background is I've always been very entrepreneurial. And for me, being able to innovate in this area was ... I've always wanted to create startups. So for me, I was compelled to do a startup next in that space. And that's kind of what pushed me to this next chapter.
David Weisburd
>> Just an elevator pitch. What is Storytime?
Aris Yeager
>> It's a marketplace that allows creators to instantly connect with different businesses. I want to say local businesses, but we work with even huge chains now, but it's supposed to be a very easy way to automate the gifting going on. So especially with the micro giftings, like a cup of coffee, a workout class, a nail salon studio, they can instantly put offers and reach hyper local creators to come in and redeem offers in exchange for posting content.
David Weisburd
>> So 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?
Aris Yeager
>> 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. 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 at these big brands like Casamigos, Kardashians, they spend a lot of money on one specific influencer. I don't think that's going to be the future of influencer marketing.
David Weisburd
>> Tell me about a specific influencer in a specific business on your platform and how does Storytime help them?
Aris Yeager
>> Imagine Jo & the Juice, right? They want to gift out a bunch of product. The most effective person that Jo & the Juice wants to target are hyper local creators that are going to be able to go in and redeem an offer 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 & the Juice. But imagine not even Jo & the Juice like Devocion, which is a coffee shop only in New York City. We're very focused on the data behind activating specific locations from the influencers that are going to help target the business.
David Weisburd
>> So you have a fashion influencer. She might be 25 years old, has 10,000 to 50,000 followers, and Jo && 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 & the Juice is getting access to her network and being able to distribute to her followers.
Aris Yeager
>> It's almost like Jo & the Juice can instantly use our platform to just reach thousands of creators locally to push certain campaigns that are a lot more effective as running Meta ads or any other type of pushing, because it's supposed to be organically done.
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.
Aris Yeager
>> Yeah.
David Weisburd
>> How are you able to get past the chicken egg problem that plagues every single network effect business?
Aris Yeager
>> Having my experience as a creator just gives me so much more legitimacy to be going into this space. And I think, because I saw it firsthand as an issue that I had. And for me, that was one of the most important parts of when I approached the product with my co-founder, very much 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 think I'm very good at connecting with other amazing founders. And my biggest objective was getting feedback from all the different founders of the big chains. For instance, the founder of Sweetgreen, the founder of OOAKBERRY, the founder of CAVA and understanding is the market ... What's the issue that they're having with activating creators and how can I help?
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 that product.
Aris Yeager
>> Yeah. Constantly listening to what feedback is from creators and from the business side.
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 were 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.
Aris Yeager
>> 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. If you're comfortable doing content, you should be doing content because it will help you regardless in what you're doing.
David Weisburd
>> Were you conscious of doing the first kind of videos? How did you overcome that fear?
Aris Yeager
>> I've always loved acting. So for me, it's come naturally to mimic other people, do funny accents. This was always my personality growing up. So I never had an issue being in front of camera. Honestly, I viewed it as fun. I enjoy mocking my friends. I think we all do it and I enjoy making videos about it. So for me, it came natural.
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?
Aris Yeager
>> Well, Storytime is that it's like a new type of courage. Right? The idea is that every day we can influence our friends. 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 just people that love brands to be able to be wanting to get rewarded about it. So Storytime is a currency for ... The idea is it's not just influencers. I don't like the idea of people thinking it's influencers with $100,000. We're very much redefining by focusing on how real is this person. A lot of the best creators that are on StoryTime, they're not influencers full-time. They work here in finance jobs. And the truth is those are the most effective people. The girl has 3,000 followers, but if she goes out for lunch and she says, "I go to Sweetgreen every day." Sweetgreen should be like, "Hey, we love that you could 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. And the way that, again, from what workout you're doing in the morning, I see you at Othership. You're a loyal follower, you're a loyal customer of Othership.
David Weisburd
>> .
Aris Yeager
>> You're rewarded for wanting to talk about Othership on your socials because it comes natural and you would want a free session in exchange. So that's the goal of Storytime.
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. 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.
Aris Yeager
>> The reality is once you reach a certain number of followers, it is harder to know that you're not a sellout because it's inevitable you're going to get crazy prices to post 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 there's a big shift in the market of, again, instead of charging, I charge $30,000 to $50,000 for a post, which I think is obscene, but taking that money and being like, how do we distribute this to hundreds and thousands of smaller creators that love our brands? That's the shift that I'm betting on in the market.
David Weisburd
>> I interviewed our mutual friends, Scott Van den Berg from HotStart, 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 problem is that most people only remember the successes. It's availability heuristics. So you only remember the things that are big, you don't remember the 99% 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. You are not only a consumer of the brand, but it's core to who you are and what you do on your day-to-day base.
Aris Yeager
>> Absolutely.
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 them successful. What was that model?
Aris Yeager
>> What they're honestly doing did a great job of, even though these are very celebrity oriented brands with one face, is that they're actually activating so many different nano micro creators. Rhodes was ... I think they spent so much money on gifting product to creators. So it's ironic, but they did it at a very incredible level already. So I think which proves it's more than just having one prominent face of the brand. Like Beats with Dr. Dre, they sent out their beats to, I think, every single athlete. Every top tier athlete was wearing beats. That was all intentional.
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 Storytime disrupting? Who would have traditionally done this or is this a completely new activity?
Aris Yeager
>> Right now, it's being done in the most manual, inefficient way, from agencies to either the owner of a restaurant or trying to hire social media people to help them with their brand. Because right now, everyone, you go out, everyone's flocking to understand how do we do influencer marketing. You have companies like Blackstone that created a TikTok. This is 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 hire positions, work with agencies, and we're just here to help the connectivity by being able to create a campaign, leveraging some AI to be able to create a campaign that's going to be best suiting for you or 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. That's it.
David Weisburd
>> You mentioned Blackstone. Jonathan Gray is now running around doing running videos. Everyone's trying to get to social . 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. 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?
Aris Yeager
>> It's a fine balance. And I think for instance, I mean, I loved Ramp's activation in the Super Bowl. It was hilarious and it's bold. But I think being bold is ... It's obviously, we see it in more tech and crypto. You'll see more companies be bold than traditional finance oriented. And I completely understand why. I'm pro controversial content because controversial, obviously with sprinkling controversial always does well, and that's how you can actually go viral on social media. You need to be daring in 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.
David Weisburd
>> People think about when they're on social media, they like and they share. They think that 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 took a lot of time and a lot of effort. People think that getting this liker and the share is this easy task, but there's a very high hurdle for that.
Aris Yeager
>> Exactly. Exactly. Some of the companies that have done it the best have obviously ... Duolingo has an incredible TikTok strategy where they were like ... Have you ever seen Duolingo's video?
David Weisburd
>> Yeah.
Aris Yeager
>> It's hilarious. People love it. And they're not afraid to make fun of themselves. And I think that's what's so great. Same with Ryanair. Ryanair is a low-fare airlines company from Ireland that you never imagine could build a social media presence, but they did.
David Weisburd
>> Mention tech companies, crypto companies are more daring. Sometimes I think about this as founder-led versus non-founder-led.
Aris Yeager
>> Yeah, it's true.
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 their max. When you're working with brands and Storytime, how much is founder-led brands? How much an advantage is that?
Aris Yeager
>> Yeah, you're absolutely right. When a company's go through more corporate structure, it's inevitable that it's harder to be daring because you have just all these different layers of approvals that you need to go by.
David Weisburd
>> Right before this interview, we were talking about the evolution of Storytime. You started out in the SMB sector where it was either easier to penetrate. Now you're going into larger brands.
Aris Yeager
>> Being able to create campaigns with AI in the most efficient ways possible for being able to activate loyal customers. And we've been doing an exceptional job with some of these big chains like Jo & the Juice and OAKBERRY. And obviously our model's very scalable into different markets. So now 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. 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 completely autonomously. And we're doing over 600 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 I think that's the power of what we're building it.
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.
Aris Yeager
>> We've used AI in a lot of different areas. It's based off what the business is looking for. For instance, 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.
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 a brand becoming influential in a new market?
Aris Yeager
>> 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 a good amount of transparency going on with who's a good creator or not. So with me and Philip, my co-founder, we 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. They must be able to have a huge impact on that business." Absolutely not. There's no vetting process. It's futile. So that's what we're all about. It's about analyzing every single data point of a creator.
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?
Aris Yeager
>> Let's think about before Storytime. They imagine they want to activate people. Just imagine the thousands of different either emails, messages that they have to send to creators to be like, "Hey, we're here in the city. Come talk about us. We want to work with you." 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 how effective, specific ... We have so many different data points to really align what is the most optimal campaign for this brand, and then just put it on autopilot, 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 product as opposed to paying an agency thousands of dollars. I would say at around a price of 500 to thousand dollars per month, depending on how much-
David Weisburd
>> And then you get the data and then you could decide to scale once it's proven out its ROI.
Aris Yeager
>> Yeah. We are 10 times cheaper than any other influencer marketing solution that's out there right now.
David Weisburd
>> StoryTime is your first company, you founded it, you've scaled it now to solid scale. What's been the thing that you most underestimated about being an entrepreneur?
Aris Yeager
>> The importance of just having a team that's aligned on just being able to outsource specific tasks and being able to really leverage. For instance, my time is best spent doing content, doing specific meetings to engage specific founders with big chains, as opposed to trying to wrap my head around technical and being able to just delegate all the ... Forming a team that is able to work on all the different .
David Weisburd
>> Is that hard to remove yourself from parts of the business and focus on the high leverage?
Aris Yeager
>> 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 is this the best use of my time?"
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 like, "What do I do?"
Aris Yeager
>> Exactly. Exactly.
David Weisburd
>> If I'm not the one that does this, how do I do that? And then you have to reassess what could I, Aris, a.k.a. European Kid, how do I leverage my time in order to grow the business versus how do I edit this video or how do I do this very specific task?
Aris Yeager
>> Exactly.
David Weisburd
>> If you could 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 Aris that would've either helped accelerate Storytime and your social media career or helped you avoid costly mistakes?
Aris Yeager
>> Honestly, just always be daring. I think the only reason that I started European Kid was purely because of a random moment where I'm like ... Because of a daringness, I was like, "Why not? Why not just try things?" So with that, when I see there's momentum picking up, being so pushing, pushing nonstop and trying things. I think that's the most important thing.
David Weisburd
>> How long did it take before you had your first viral hit?
Aris Yeager
>> I remember starting around COVID where I was playing around with even having a TikTok account and then after ... Yeah. And then I would say around a year in, I did the Louis video and that obviously ... That started the character.
David Weisburd
>> A lot of people ask about motivation when somebody's made it. It's actually pretty easy probably now to make videos, millions of people watch it and take motivation. But the hardest thing is a zero to one before anyone's watching. Was that a hard part for you? Did you have a strategy to make it easier?
Aris Yeager
>> No strategy. Very ... Just posting, trying to make it feel more like something that's fun and 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 I think that you have to be creative. I didn't know a rich French kid would be the one that takes off, right? I just was experimenting with different angles. So 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.
David Weisburd
>> And sometimes even when it's working, you don't quite know. You don't really know why it works. You have some theories and some factors, but you don't know exactly why it works.
Aris Yeager
>> Exactly.
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 worked out quite well. What could I do for you and what would you like from our network?
Aris Yeager
>> Just being able to get constantly your advice is always useful to navigate through all the different kind of ... From raising capital to building a team. Obviously you have a lot of ... I have great network, but you have great networks.
David Weisburd
>> Our networks are very different.
Aris Yeager
>> I think it's-
David Weisburd
>> I have very few influencers and you have very few institutional investors.
Aris Yeager
>> No, exactly. And I think that's where combining that ... That's the ultimate success. It's actually, it's all a network play. I believe obviously you need to work hard, but the second thing is really leveraging the network around you to get things done because that's how you're going to be-
David Weisburd
>> About finding the right players on your team to fill the different holes where you might not have your strength.
